Getting a great college education is all about making choices, Dean Virginia Sapiro told incoming College of Arts & Sciences students at an orientation session on July 31.
“Today you will begin to make a very important choice,” she said. “In your life here at BU, will you choose to get a degree or will you choose to get an education? All of the resources for a great education lie before you.”
Sapiro encouraged incoming freshmen and transfer students to think about the impact they will have on their new community in addition to how the experience will change them. “You will change this place just as it changes you, because a university is its people—its students, faculty, and staff,” she said. “Any time in your life when you are a member of a community, your engagement will change that community. Choose to change it for the better.”
To get the most out of a BU education, Sapiro offered eight tips:
- “Take responsibility for your education and your experience,” she said. “Think about what kind of person you want to be when you leave here, what kind of impact you want to have on the world, what kind of friends you want to carry with you when you leave.”
- “Get to know at least one professor well each year.” Sapiro pointed to research showing that getting to know just one professor makes a difference in a student’s academic success.
- “Every semester, decide whether you’re here to get an education or get a degree. If you’re here to get an education, you’ll get a degree, but if you are only here for the credential, you might miss important parts of the education.”
- “Seek out course work in an area in which you never imagined you’d be interested. This is part of the joy of being at a large university.”
- “Seek advice and take it. Work with faculty and your advisors.”
- “Learn from each other. The quality of your education will depend almost as much on your interactions with other students as it will on your interactions with professors.”
- “Take advantage of this campus and this city. Boston offers a richness of culture and communities. Get out there and discover it.”
- “Understand that as you begin your life at Boston University, you will be a part of the community for the rest of your life—now as a student, later as a member of a wonderful worldwide community of alumni.”