We have now welcomed our students back to campus for the second semester of the academic year. They include returning freshmen who are still acclimating to our academic environment, as well as seniors looking forward to taking their next step. Like the freshmen, this is my second semester at BU, and I want to share my impressions with you of our undergraduate students.
CAS has well over 6,500 students, and each is different, but I am tempted to generalize. To me, they seem ambitious, engaged, and curious. They take advantage of opportunities, filling our elective first-year seminars (FY 101 and 103), applying to the new CAS On-Campus Internship Program, double majoring, studying abroad, and engaging in undergraduate research. They speak up in class; they go to office hours. They seem, in short, to know why they are here and to be taking full advantage of the opportunities available to them.
Paul Lipton, director of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, has this to say: “One of my favorite things about working with UROP is getting to see the full range of student projects, their successes, and their tremendous contributions to the scholarly activities of our faculty.” Recent student research topics include the temperance movement, Noh theatre, cloud computing, and mitochondrial DNA.
CAS students are engaged in the intellectual life of our institution. They contribute to our community just as we seek to guide them.
They will go on to do amazing things, like the 2011 graduate of Pardee who is on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, who started a charity that builds homes in developing countries, including Haiti. Some of the majors in your departments will apply to graduate school and become specialists in the fields to which you introduced them. Many more will go on to lives outside the academy.
Here’s what we know about the class of 2014 (our most recent data): 59 percent of CAS students were employed fulltime, while 18 percent were enrolled in graduate or professional school. The rest were either still looking for work or engaged in another activity, such as volunteering, making for a total of 82 percent who are not going back to school, at least not right away. That’s a higher percentage than I would have expected before I came to BU, but now I see how it fits the collective spirit here.
Our former students are now legal assistants and business analysts, software developers and math teachers. They work as research technicians, editors, and statisticians. They are studying law, medicine, physics, history, and theology. If you’d like more information about the graduates of your own department, BU’s Center for Career Development is happy to meet with you.
Although CAS is already offering an impressive number of high quality academic opportunities to our students, how can we do better? One thing we can do is engage more of our alumni in creating internships and other business experiences that are integrated into the academic experience. For example, we are reaching out to our alumni in Silicon Valley to see if we could provide placements in tech startups along with a faculty-guided course that helps students relate their classwork directly to their work experience.
A liberal arts and sciences education prepares our students well to engage with the world. Our students truly can go anywhere their passion leads them, particularly if they have an opportunity to apply their education while they are still our students.
While my office undergoes some renovation, I have moved to temporary digs in the basement of the CAS building, near many classrooms. I am enjoying sharing the hallway with students between classes and witnessing the energy and excitement they bring to CAS. These BU students are exceptionally bright and eager to learn from us and engage with the opportunities we offer. They are doers and will be tomorrow’s leaders.