Wake Forest University

Wake Forest University Introduction

Wake Forest is a small, liberal arts institution that offers the resources of a much larger university. The school boasts thirty-seven majors, study-abroad programs in five continents, three libraries with nearly 1.8 million volumes, and big-time Atlantic Coast Conference sports, but the average undergraduate class size is just nineteen and professors almost always know all their students’ names. Only a handful of classes are taught by graduate students, and large lecture halls are virtually nonexistent. Faculty members are very committed both to teaching and getting to know their students. Though many faculty members have also conducted outstanding research, their focus is clearly on undergraduates.

The university has more than 4,200 undergraduate students. While long-considered a respected regional institution, the school has gained national recognition in the last twentyfive years, hovering in or near the top twenty-five in major college rankings and cranking out eleven Rhodes Scholars over the last twenty years. Though the private school tuition can be steep for many families, the school has a broad merit scholarships program, attracting top students from around the country with partial and full scholarships for academic achievement, leadership, and distinction in the performing arts.

The campus is set on 340-acres in Winston-Salem, N C, on the edge of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The campus is a roughly fifteen-minute walk from end to end, and students won’t make it across without running into a few familiar faces. Most students live on campus all four years, shaping a close-knit and friendly community. The campus has been recognized as one of the most beautiful in the country. In the spring, it teems with daffodils and flowering dogwoods; in the fall, students enjoy warm afternoons under the changing leaves of ash trees on the main quad. Wait Chapel, which has hosted two presidential debates, most recently in 2000, anchors the campus.

The university was founded by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina in 1834, but cut formal ties to the convention in 1986. Though the school is more than 170 years old, the Georgian-style campus just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The university was founded in Wake County, North Carolina, about two hours east of its present location, but opened in Winston-Salem in 1956 on land donated by the Reynolds family (of tobacco company fame) and with money from a family foundation.

Winston-Salem is a city of about 227,000. The downtown, about four miles from campus, has undergone a rebirth over the last five years and now hosts an annual film festival, monthly art gallery hops, and a warm-weather outdoor concert series with performances three nights a week. Old tobacco warehouses are being renovated as loft apartments, and with the addition of new bars and restaurants, downtown’s nightlife is growing. The city is home to five other colleges, among them Winston-Salem State University and the North Carolina School of the Arts, and is home to the headquarters of Reynolds American, Sara Lee, Hanes, and Krispy Kreme. The city is less than a forty-five-minute drive from two state parks that offer great trails for day-hikers and gorgeous views of the North Carolina Piedmont.

The university’s motto is Pro Humanitate, and this is emphasized throughout campus life. Most students do some kind of volunteer service, whether it’s providing English as a Second Language, tutoring at a local elementary school, or working at an AIDS hospice. The university sponsors several service trips over the winter break, sending students to work with the destitute and dying in Calcutta and to build schools in Vietnam. The university also sponsors “Project Pumpkin,” which brings more than 1,500 children from community agencies to campus to trick-or-treat in residence halls and play festival games with costumed undergrads.

Other campus traditions include the Lovefeast, a candlelit Christmas service grounded in the area’s Moravian traditions and held annually in Wait Chapel, and “Rolling the Quad,” a postgame celebration for big athletic wins that involves covering the quad’s trees in toilet paper and leaves nearby dorms woefully undersupplied for the remainder of the weekend following Saturday victories. During exam weeks, faculty and staff take to the kitchens of a campus dining hall to serve a late night breakfast of pancakes and scrambled eggs to weary students, even carrying their trays for them as they wait in line.

Wake Forest is a place with a strong sense of community where undergraduate students feel like they truly matter. Professors and staff really get to know the students here, and students often form lasting relationships with faculty members. Professors show up on more than a few wedding invitation lists of graduates. Motivated students can excel here and leave an impact. Past students founded a nonprofit organization that assists African hospitals, helped create new interdisciplinary minors, and started campus traditions like the Lovefeast and winter-break service trips. Academic coursework is rigorous but rewarding, and opportunities for students to push themselves intellectually are plentiful, from writing an honors thesis in your major to designing and receiving funding for a summer project. Professors are extremely accessible to undergraduates, and teaching remains the priority for faculty members.

One drawback of this small Southern school is that the student body tends to be somewhat racially homogenous. Though minority recruitment has been a priority for the admissions office and the school’s minority population has been growing, the percentage of students who are part of minority racial or ethnic groups still hovers at fifteen percent. And although the university’s suburban location is scenic, it can sometimes feel isolating, especially for students without a car. Winston-Salem provides plenty of entertainment options, but students have to drive, not walk, to just about all of them spread out across the city. If you’re looking for a college town experience, Wake Forest is probably not the right place for you.

But if you’re looking for a place where you’ll have the amenities and resources of a large university without the feeling that you’re part of a faceless crowd, give Wake Forest a good look. When you’re sitting in the five-story windowed atrium of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, cheering the Deacs on at an ACC basketball game, or mulling over the varied course offerings for the spring semester, you’ll feel like you’re at a much larger institution. But when you run into your freshman-year English professor just before graduation and he remembers not only your name, but your hometown, you’ll realize you’re at a place like few others. Under the magnolia trees and clear-blue Carolina sky, you’ll find the best of both worlds here.

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Wake Forest University Academics

Students not-so-affectionately refer to the university as “Work Forest.” Classes are small, most range from about ten to thirty students, so professors expect a lot and notice when you don’t show up. Most are strict about attendance and expect participation, and professors, not graduate students, teach every class. The ten-to-one student-to-faculty ratio means professors have time for individual students. With the exception of some introductory science and communication classes, professors will be the ones grading your papers. Professors have scheduled office hours, but most have open-door policies where students are free to stop by any time. Faculty members, of whom eighty-nine percent hold Ph.D.s, enjoy teaching, and undergraduates get the kind of personal attention that only graduate students may get at larger universities. Expect a few invitations to dinner at professors’ houses.

Curriculum

The backbone of a Wake Forest degree is a liberal arts curriculum, and students are required to take a broad range of courses in the humanities and sciences. Among the requirements are courses in a foreign language, fine arts and literature, as well as classes in mathematics or the natural sciences and two courses in health and exercise. All freshmen are required to take a freshman seminar, a small class that covers topics like the analytical methods of Sherlock Holmes, the rise of the computer game culture, and the intent and interpretations of the Bill of Rights. Most students complete the liberal arts requirements in their first two years, spending their junior and senior years on electives and courses for their majors and minors.

For students unsure of what they’d like to study, the required classes provide a chance to explore existing interests or discover new ones. Michelle Sikes, a 2007 graduate and the university’s most recent Rhodes Scholar, called the liberal arts curriculum one of the university’s strongest points. Sikes chose her mathematical-economics major after taking an economics course to satisfy one of the liberal arts requirements. She said she’d always loved math, and in economics she found “a way to use math that was helpful and applicable to the real world.”

Wake has such a broad curriculum that they make you take that you really have to be able to do well in everything from science and math to reading and writing in foreign languages. — Michelle Sikes, `2007, Rhodes Scholar

The student who comes to Wake Forest intent on applying to medical school may very well end up a biology major, or he or she might switch tracks to philosophy after discovering a love of Rousseau in a required course.

Students can earn a B.A. or B.S. in thirty-seven majors. The most popular are communication, business, psychology, political science, biology, economics, and English. The university also offers thirty-one minors, plus an additional nineteen interdisciplinary minors in areas like cultural resource preservation, Latin-American studies, neuroscience, and health policy and administration. Professors welcome suggestions for new minors or courses of study. Students can apply to the Calloway School of Business and Accountancy in the spring of their sophomore year. The school offers majors in accounting, business, finance, and mathematical business. Accounting students can earn their bachelor’s and master’s in accounting in five years, and the program’s graduates have ranked either first or second in the nation for the highest pass rate on the CPA exam over the last five years. The Calloway School was ranked seventeenth on Business Week magazine’s list of top fifty undergraduate business schools.

The Calloway School of Business and Accountancy moved into a new 57,000-square-foot facility in 2004. The Kirby Hall, home to the Calloway Center of Business, Mathematics and Computer Science, was a $14 million project, which added an entirely new building connected to what is known as West Hall. In addition to Calloway, the building also houses mathematics, computer science, and the Center for Undergraduate Entrepreneurship. Motivated students can graduate with honors in their major by writing a thesis or completing an independent project. Wake Forest also gives students the opportunities and the funding to do research or complete independent projects at home or abroad over the summer. Recent projects have involved working on women’s health issues in Peru, researching religious sites in India, and completing an internship at Florida’s Dolphin Research Center. The university has also begun a Washington, DC, program that allows students to earn credit while interning and living in the nation’s capital for a semester.

Study Abroad

Wake Forest strongly encourages its students to spend a semester or a summer exploring another part of the world. About sixty percent of Wake Forest students study abroad, placing the school fourth among major universities according to the 2006 Open Doors report from the Institute of International Education. The university owns houses in the Hampstead neighborhood of London, on the Grand Canal in Venice, and in the Nineteenth District of Vienna. In these programs, a university professor, and often his or her family, lives with a group of students who are taught two classes by the Wake Forest professor and two by native professors. The programs have a four-day-a-week class schedule and a two-week mid-semester break, leaving plenty of time for travel within the host country or beyond. Wake Forest also has exchange programs with universities in Dijon, France; Salamanca, Spain; and Beijing, China. For those who don’t want to spend a full semester abroad, summer study opportunities include a cultural anthropology program in Nepal, Arabic courses in Morocco, and an opportunity to learn about tropical diversity in Peru. Students may also choose to study with a program that is not affiliated with Wake Forest and then transfer the credits earned. The Center for International Studies provides excellent assistance in helping students find the programs that are right for them, as well as work out the logistics of transferring credits or carrying financial aid abroad. It also offers study-abroad scholarships that can be applied to travel or other expenses.

I sat on the lush grass of Regent Park’s Primrose Hill and gazed at the central London skyline in the distance. Not a bad place to study for a few hours, I thought.

I spent four months at Wake Forest’s Worrell House over a spring semester. Fifteen students, along with a professor and her family, shared the four-story home at the edge of London’s Hampstead neighborhood.

Our theater course, a standard for every group that studies at Worrell House, included performances each week in London’s West End theater district, oftentimes with some of the best seats in the house. We also took in shows by the Royal Shakespeare Company on a class trip to Stratford-upon-Avon and toured the New Globe Theatre in London.

An art class brought weekly lectures from the director of one of the world’s largest collections of British art with separate trips to London’s galleries led by another professor. Our political science courses took us through the halls of Parliament and into London’s courtrooms.

The four-day-a-week class schedule left time for weekend trips to places like Edinburgh, Bath, Cardiff, and Paris, and my two-week spring break spanned four countries. I rowed a boat around a lake in Madrid’s El Parque del Retiro, went to a Mass led by the Pope in Rome, and woke up from an overnight train ride with a view of the sun rising over the Mediterranean Sea.

When I flew to London, it was the first time I’d ever been on a plane. I returned four months later with plenty of stamps in my passport and a new view of the world.

Technology

All students receive a laptop computer with a CD burner and DVD player as well as an all-in-one color printer/scanner/copier as part of their tuition. At the beginning of the junior year, each student trades in the old laptop for an upgraded model and keeps that computer upon graduation. In addition to the university’s professionally staffed computer helpline, Resident Technology Advisors, computer-savvy students trained to address any problems with the laptops are available in each dorm. Students can access the Internet from almost anywhere on campus, twenty-four hours a day via the campus-wide, highspeed, wireless network.

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Wake Forest University Admissions

Admission to Wake Forest has become increasingly competitive. Applications jumped by more than ninteen percent from 2004—2005 to 2005—2006. Of the 7,500 students who applied for fall 2006 admission, about thirty-eight percent were accepted. The middle fifty percent of students scored from 1280 to 1400 on the SAT I, and thirty-five percent of current freshmen were in the top five percent of their high school class.

The 2006 entering class of 1,126 students hailed from forty-four different states and fourteen foreign countries. Twenty-three percent of the entering class was from North Carolina, with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia rounding out the most represented states. Increasing the racial and ethnic diversity has been a priority for the admissions office, and the 2006 class had the highest ever number of minority students at seventeen percent. Black Enterprise magazine ranked Wake Forest twenty-second on its 2006 list of “50 Top Colleges for African Americans.”

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Martha Allman said students seeking admission to Wake Forest should take the most strenuous curriculum available that they can manage. “Bloom where you’re planted,” she said. In addition to SAT scores and class rankings, the admissions office looks at an applicant’s recommendations, leadership record, and enrollment in Advanced Placement or honor courses. They also make heavy use of essays and shortanswer questions on the admissions application. Students must write two essays and respond to short-answer prompts like “What outrages you?” and “Describe yourself in fifty words or less.” “We’re looking for students who look outside themselves,” Allman said. “The student who is tuned into what is going on around them, the student who is interested in many things. We are looking at students who are compassionate [and] students who have done community service, and not just as a resume builder.” The university began accepting ACT scores for the first time for the fall 2006 class.

The university accepts the Common Application, though a supplement is required. Early Decision applications require an early decision agreement and must be received by November 15. The Regular Admission deadline is January 15, though students who want to be considered for the university’s most generous scholarships should submit their applications, as well as a separate scholarship application, by December 1. Several of the merit-based scholarships also require an on-campus interview for finalists. Though not required, Allman said she encourages other students to set up interviews as well.

Finally, Allman offers this piece of advice to students: Don’t spread yourselves too thin. “I think there has been a push to talk about well roundedness of students and that has caused high school students to think, `I have to play four sports, and I have to be in orchestra, and I have to be in all these clubs.’” she said. “Your first priority should be your school work, then pick a few things that you really enjoy, that you’re really good at, and spend your extracurricular time there. Don’t just resume build.”

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Wake Forest University Financial Aid

Wake Forest is part of a group of top schools committed to a need-blind admissions policy, meaning ability to pay is not considered when an admissions decision is made. Though Wake Forest has been recognized as a value among elite private schools, costs of attendance are still high. Sixty-three percent of undergraduates receive some type of financial assistance, with thirty-six percent receiving need-based aid. For the 2005­2006 academic year, students with need received an average of $17,300 in scholarship and grant funds.

The university also offers work-study positions to help students cover the costs of attendance, and about thirty percent of undergraduates work part-time. The university has a broad and generous merit scholarships program, with top scholarships covering the full costs of tuition and attendance, allowances for books and other needs, and summer grants for individual study projects. Some scholarships are awarded on the basis of pure merit, others consider merit with other factors, like whether the student is part of a historically underrepresented group or is a North Carolina resident. Other scholarships are awarded for outstanding leadership, entrepreneurship, written or oral communication skills, community service, or talent in the arts.

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Wake Forest University Students

Wake Forest is tucked into a suburban area of the city, so there are few off-campus entertainment options that students can walk to. As such, most of the university’s social activities are centered on campus. The Greek system is a major part of campus life; about thirty-three percent of men are affiliated with a fraternity, and fifty-three percent of women are affiliated with a sorority. The Greek system is very integrated into the campus as a whole. Students who choose to live with their fraternity or sorority members do so in blocks of on-campus housing rather than in mansions tagged with Greek letters, and many members choose not to live with their organizations at all. On weekend nights, Greek groups sponsor parties open to all students in their lounges, and students can hop back and forth across the quad from one party to another.

The campus provides plenty of cultural options, both student-produced and professional. There is rarely a night when there isn’t a play, concert, poetry reading, or lecture to attend. The Secrest Artists Series brings internationally renowned performers like violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, and Doc Severinsen and his Big Band to campus, with free tickets for students. Student Union draws popular big-name acts to Wait Chapel, with past performers including Dave Matthews, Guster, Nickel Creek, Ben Folds, and comedians Lewis Black, Adam Sandler, and Kevin Nealon. There are student-produced plays, a cappella concerts, ethnic festivals, discounted movie screenings, and art gallery exhibitions. Several times a year, the Lilting Banshees campus comedy troupe mocks Wake Forest life in its midnight sketch-comedy shows.

The white lights of luminaries lined the quad, right up to the steps of Wait Chapel where a bright Moravian star hung above. Inside, students and Winston-Salem residents were gathering for the annual Lovefeast, a Christmas celebration honoring the area’s Moravian heritage.

Wake Forest’s Lovefeast began in 1965 and has become the largest in North America. There was something about the simple beauty of this service that brought me back every year.

Servers, who might be classmates or your professors, passed out sweet buns and coffee to the more than 2,000 people who packed the chapel.

The chapel was darkened as the choir led carols. Each worshipper held a beeswax candle. A single flame became thousands as it was passed from candle to candle, across each row, then back to the next. It sometimes gave me goosebumps.

For the final carol, “Joy to the World,” everyone held their candles high, thousands of tiny points of light brightening the darkness and warming the soul.

North Carolina’s mild climate means that lots of campus socializing happens outdoors. In warm weather, which is really all but a few months of the year, students hang out on the university’s main quad or on nearby Davis Field, where wooden swings hang from tree branches. Reynolda Gardens, just a short path through the woods away from campus, offers study spots in the formal garden and nearby fields. The garden’s running trails are heavily used by the health-conscious student body. Students are also free to use the campus track, tennis courts, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, and pool. There are also several sand volleyball courts scattered around campus. The Miller Center offers weights and cardiovascular machines, and for a small fee students can attend an unlimited number of aerobics, yoga, spinning, and other classes. The university’s campus recreation department opened the university’s first climbing wall for students, faculty and staff in Reynolds Gymnasium.

Off campus, the city’s Borders and Barnes and Noble bookstores are favorite study spots. Fourth Street, downtown’s main drag, offers dining options ranging from pizza to Thai food to brewery fare and boasts an occasional independent film series. Trade Street has become a funky arts destination, with its gallery hops and concert series. The city has a number of local theater companies and also began hosting the River Run International Film Festival, an annual film festival, several years ago. Ziggy’s, less than a mile from campus, brings in local and national music acts. For upperclassmen, bars in the city’s West End and on Burke Street are popular hangouts. Hanes Mall, about a fifteen-minute drive from campus, houses many familiar national retail chains. There are easy day-trips to several state parks with great hiking. For security, gates at the campus’s vehicle entranceways close at 10 P.M. every night, though students, faculty, and staff with parking passes can come and go freely at all hours. Visitors must register with guards at the two gatehouses.

Housing and Dining

More than seventy percent of students live on campus. The university guarantees housing for eight semesters, and students are required to live on campus for their first two years. Upperclassmen wishing to live off campus must apply to do so, but many choose to stay on campus in apartment-style housing. Polo Residence Hall, which opened in 1998, consists of townhouse-style apartments. In four-person units, each student gets his or her own bedroom and shares a kitchen, living room, and two bathrooms. Two-person apartments have a single bedroom, a living area, bathroom, and kitchenette. Student apartments are older but provide two-person units with two bedrooms and a shared bathroom, kitchenette, and living area surrounding a courtyard. Upperclassmen are usually also able to secure single rooms in suites on the quad. Housing for underclassmen is hall or suite-style, with most students in double-occupancy rooms. All rooms are air-conditioned and all the university’s dorms are coeducational. First-year students have the option of living in Johnson Hall, a substance-free residence hall in which students have agreed to refrain from smoking and alcohol use.

Groups of students may also apply for Theme Housing within the university’s residence halls or in university-owned houses across the street from campus. Theme Housing is aimed at allowing students with common educational or extracurricular interests to live together. Current themes include acting, physical fitness, environmentally friendly living, tolerance, and technology. Groups interested in applying for Theme Housing must have a mission statement and a plan for how their theme house will benefit the university and community. For those students who do want to live off campus, there are plenty of apartment complexes a short drive from the university and off-campus housing is generally inexpensive, unlike that of major college towns. There are also rental homes available along streets adjacent to campus.

All students who live on campus must have a meal plan; options vary by class standing and residence hall. The university’s main dining hall was recently renovated. Its official name is The Fresh Food Company, but students know the sunken dining hall as “The Pit.” Offerings there include fresh salads and deli sandwiches, Italian dishes, burgers and hot subs off the grill, fresh ethnic entrees, and traditional Southern favorites. The Benson University Center offers Pizza Hut, Chick-fil-A, and Panera bagels. Benson is also home to Shorty’s, a campus pub of sorts that offers Starbucks coffee and, for students twenty-one and over, beer on tap. It is a fun place to watch a game and often hosts student musicians. The Magnolia Room, open for lunch on weekdays, offers buffet-style dining with white tablecloths, cloth napkins, and great views. It’s a great place to meet friends for a leisurely lunch between classes and serves some of the best sweet tea around. Other campus dining options include a Subway, a small food court near the Worrell Professional Center, and a convenience store for students who want to do some cooking of their own.

Clubs and Organizations

There are 125 on-campus organizations, from Gospel Choir to Aviation Club to men’s and women’s Ultimate Frisbee teams, to cater to students with varied interests. There are a range of religious groups, with several offering on-campus services, and a cappella groups of all stripes. The Volunteer Service Corps sponsors outreach programs and can help match students up with local agencies. It also sponsors international service trips over winter break and domestic spring break trips in which students have helped with environmental clean-up and worked in homeless shelters. Intramural sports are also popular, with twenty sports for men and sixteen for women. The student-run newspaper, The Old Gold and Black, comes out every Thursday and has won several national awards. Students also publish The Howler yearbook, several literary and poetry magazines, and a journal of scholarly essays. If there isn’t a group that suits your interest, start one yourself. Student Government handles all budget requests for student organizations and decides how the money is doled out.

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Wake Forest University Athletics

Wake Forest is the smallest school in the Atlantic Coast Conference and the third smallest school in the country to field a Division I football team, but its sports programs have enjoyed huge success. The school’s basketball team, which has cranked out NBA stars like Josh Howard, Tim Duncan, and Chris Paul, has often been ranked in the top twenty-five. The golf program has turned out stars like Arnold Palmer, Curtis Strange, and Jay Haas and has earned three national championships. The football team finished the 2006 season as ACC Champions, earning an appearance in the BCS Orange Bowl, which drew the largest gathering of alumni in Wake Forest history. The field hockey team won three consecutive national championships from 2002 to 2004 and played in the national championship title game in 2006. And both the men’s and women’s soccer teams finished their 2006 seasons in the top twenty-five. The university’s 2006 fall sports success even attracted national attention, with USA Todayrecently profiling the athletics program under the headline “Tiny Wake Forest turns its size into an asset.”

Students get free tickets to all home games. Fall brings tailgates and football at Groves Stadium, and winter brings the ACC basketball season, when fans clad in gold and black tie-dyes fill Lawrence Joel Memorial Coliseum to watch the Deacs take on the likes of Duke and UNC—Chapel Hill. Big athletic victories merit “Rolling the Quad,” as students—and sometimes a few professors—cover the ash trees of the university’s main lawn with long ribbons of white toilet paper. The university also prides itself on its high graduation rate for student athletes. Of Division I schools with football programs, Wake Forest has the best graduation rate in the nation at ninety-six percent.

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Wake Forest University Traditions

Rolling the Quad

After major athletic victories, students and sometimes faculty and staff send rolls of toilet paper flying over the ash trees of the university’s main quad. Billowing toilet paper never looked so beautiful.

Project Pumpkin

This annual volunteer event brings more than 1,500 children from community agencies to trick-or-treat in dorm rooms and play games set up in residence hall lounges and across the quad. Most undergraduate students dress up to join in the festivities.

Lovefeast

This candle lit service in Wait Chapel honors the area’s Moravian heritage and tradition. Students and community members sing carols and partake in the traditional feast of sweet buns and coffee.

Brain Piccolo Cancer Fund Drive

Student groups raise money for the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University in honor of Piccolo, a former Wake Forest football player and member of the Chicago Bears whose friendship with African-American teammate Gale Sayers and death from cancer at the age of twenty-six inspired the movie Brian’s Song. Through events like Dance-A-Thons, races, and silent auctions, Greek groups raise more than $50,000 annually for the fund.

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Wake Forest University Alumni

In an average class, eighty-eight percent of students graduate in five years or less. Within six months of graduation about thirty percent of graduates are enrolled in graduate or professional school and sixty percent are employed. Advising is available for prelaw and premedical students. In a recent year, sixty-eight percent of those applying to medical school were accepted, more than twenty percentage points higher than the national average. About sixty percent of those applying to law schools were accepted.

For students deciding on potential career paths, the Office of Career Services provides a resource center packed with career information, an Alumni Career Assistance Program that hooks students up with alums employed in various professions, and helps in finding internships. For those actively searching for jobs or internships, the office helps students prepare by offering individual job search counseling, resume consultations, and mock interviews. Career Services also organizes on-campus job and graduate school fairs and recruiting opportunities and keeps a database of job openings. It also holds networking forums in several major cities across the country.

Many other students opt to spend a year or two after graduation in service. Programs like Teach for America and Americorps are particularly popular. The university ranked eleventh among schools with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates on the Peace Corps’ 2006 list of top-producing colleges and universities. The university also has a program dedicated to helping current undergraduates or recent grads apply for postgraduate scholarship and fellowship programs, like the Rhodes, Truman, and Fulbright scholarships.

Prominent Grads

• A. R. Ammons, Poet
• Richard Burr, U.S. Senator
• James Cain, U.S. Ambassador to Denmark
• Evelyn “Pat” Foote, Retired Brigadier General, U.S. Army
• A1 Hunt, Managing Editor for Government Reporting, Bloomberg News
• Penelope Niven, Biographer
• Maria Henson, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist
• Billy Packer, Sports Commentator
• Lee Norris, Actor, One Tree Hill
• Arnold Palmer, Professional Golfer
• Brian Piccolo, Professional Football Player
• Tim Duncan, Professional Basketball Player
• Will D. Campbell, Author
• Marc Blucas, Actor, First Daughter and The Alamo
• Jim Perdue, Chairman, CEO, Perdue Farms
• Charles Ergen, Chairman, CEO, EchoStar
• Ken Thompson, Chairman, CEO, Wachovia
• Chris Paul, Professional Basketball Player
• Curtis Strange, Professional Golfer
• W. J. Cash, Author

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Carnegie Foundation Classification

Research Universities (high research activity)

General Characteristics

Highest offering	Doctoral degree
Calendar System	Semester
Years of college work required	N/A
Variable Tuition

Special Learning Opportunities

Distance Learning
ROTC — Army / Navy / Air Force	— / /
Study Abroad
Weekend College
Teacher Certification