Welcoming a New Freshman Class to Campus
June 28, 2012
To the Georgia Tech community:
Enthusiasm for pursuing an undergraduate education at Georgia Tech has never been greater. This next week we will welcome the first group of freshmen to FASET as part of what is shaping up as our best and most diverse freshman class in Georgia Tech history. In all likelihood, it will also be our largest. While I am sure that there are many reasons, I cannot help but wonder if our prospective students and their parents are reading the national media reports, such as Bloomberg Businessweek and Payscale.com, that rank a Georgia Tech education as one of the best in terms of “return on investment” in the country.
As many of you know, the process by which we “build” our freshman class is based in part on statistical analysis, part on historical trends, and part on educated guesswork. Those of you with college-age children may remember your students applying to multiple universities and then making their decision based upon the schools that have accepted them. Knowing some will choose to attend elsewhere, Tech, like all universities, offers acceptance to more students than they can accommodate in the hopes of settling on a target class size.
This year, more students than ever have indicated that they plan to attend Georgia Tech. By any measure this is a positive development, but it will require us to carefully consider how we can effectively serve these additional students in order to ensure that they can enroll in the classes they need and that they have the same high-quality educational experience for which we have become so well known.
We first noticed this increasing trend in the number of acceptances this past spring, and in response, created a working group to identify the actions and resources — things like housing, course registration, additional instructors and academic support, to name a few — necessary to ensure that we provide the best possible student experience.
Ensuring a good experience will also require that each of us helps to make these new students feel welcome. Whether it’s helping to direct students and families to their proper destination or exercising patience as lines on campus get a bit longer, I want to encourage you to help us create a welcoming environment for the newest members of our community, for they are our future.
Thank you in advance for your assistance in showing our new freshmen the very best we here at Georgia Tech have to offer.
Go Jackets,
G. P. “Bud” Peterson
