Welcome Session

Good evening, everyone. I'm glad that you could join us tonight for our virtual open house.

I'm going to give it one second to make sure my colleagues give me a thumbs up about my volume and then we're going to go ahead and get started.

Catherine, we can't hear you.

OK.

Sorry.

All right, we're going to try this again, and I think everyone can hear me now.

So, all right. Well, thank you all for joining us this evening. Sorry for my slight technical difficulties there for a few minutes.

So we have a number of presentations for you this evening to witness, take part in share. We are recording all of them and we'll be posting them on website here in the next couple days. After they're ready to go, we will let everyone know what that link is and how to access all those presentations. For my presentation, we're going to be using a little bit of interactive software. So I'm going to go ahead and get started.

So you can join our presentation at mentee.com and use the code 15555835 on the top of my screen so that you can participate with me and we have some questions and things that we're going to do, things we're going to go through and hopefully you'll find this enjoyable and not just sit here and listen to me for like 1/2 an hour, but also you know, you'll learn something too.

So for all of those out there watching this, are you left-handed or are you right-handed?

OK, it looks like the majority of our participants are right-handed this evening. We're going to give it just a couple more seconds for everyone to get in and vote to make sure everyone has participation that wants to.

All right, so vast majority of our attendees tonight are right-handed. Uh, let's see here. Next question, where are you attending from tonight? I guess you're not technically visiting us, but visiting us virtually.

Jamaica.

Nigeria. Chicago. Awesome. Think the weather in Jamaica is probably warmer here. Florida too. Love that.

All right, so several from Chicago, but somebody from Jamaica, somebody South Carolina, Arizona. So some places warmer than it is in Springfield today.

What are you hoping to learn this evening through our presentations?

And it doesn't just have to be limited to the welcome session, it can be anything you're hoping to learn tonight. Feel free to go ahead and type an answer for us.

All right. So more about the campus getting used to the transfer process, graduate programs, majors and programs.

Um, psych programs, legal programs, UIS alright. So several different things. A lot of them are about programs specifically later on this evening there are some sessions that are academic based specifically about our colleges. So feel free to definitely take advantage of those different programs that are available and different college.

Sessions.

OK, so this is a little bit about me. I know you only have me in the little screen on your device, but tell me what you think. Am I a first generation student or not? Transfer student or not? Honors Program right-handed Interior design major? What do you think?

OK, is everybody voted?

All right.

Ohh one more. There we go. OK, here we go.

Alright, so, um, welcome. By the way, my name's Catherine Coleman. I'm the director of admission here at UIS. When I went to college, I was a first generation college student. My mom was a single mother of four kids and she knew nothing about the process. So I was very much on my own and then I became kind of my brothers college coach when they started looking into colleges. I was not a transfer student. Umm, I stayed at 1 institution for my entire undergraduate career.

I was in their honors program. That was a great experience. I met, you know, people that I would not have met. And I always encourage students. When you come to college, there's like that scary thing for roommate matching. You should do that because you're going to meet someone you may have not met, and it's always it's going to be a good experience for you, whether you decide to live with them in the future. After that first year or even the entire first year, you'll meet people that you didn't already meet. So it's great to spread your wings.

And do something that you know, maybe not everyone else you know is doing. I am left-handed. So for that one lone left-hander out there, I'm with you. And I was not an interior design major. I was a management major in our College of business where I went to college. So that's a little bit about me.

So a little bit about UIS, why you're here to learn and what you're here to learn about. So US is a teaching focused experience. I talk about our faculty on our campus. When we hire them, they do research and things, but research is not their main focus on our campus. So their main focus is to be in the classroom teaching our students. So you're going to have professors that want to be in the classroom with you, they want to learn about.

You, they want to impart their knowledge and you know, learn things about what your goals are and abundance of opportunities to collaborate here at UIS. So lots of ways to be involved inside and outside of the classroom. There's internship opportunities, there's over 80 different clubs and organizations, all kinds of things, and we really want students to get involved in those different things, experience those things because it makes you a well-rounded person when you get out of college and go into the real world.

Uh, right side supportive community. So I think we're a great size at about 4000 students, not too big, not too small. You're going to have great class sizes on our campus. And you know, it's big enough that you will not know every single person on campus, but small enough that when you're walking by people, they're going to look familiar and they're going to say hi and things like that. It's a very friendly place as well. So I've really enjoyed that during my time working at UIS.

The tradition of educating public servants and leaders. So we are in the state capital of Illinois, which is in the middle of the state. We're about 3 hours from Chicago, about an hour and a half from St. Louis, MO, and so, you know, kind of between two major cities in the United States.

The capital is just downtown in Springfield. We have a lot of internships and students who go down to the Capitol for various events, to do internships, to engage with legislature members, to engage with offices that help run the state. So a lot of, you know, interaction and really you can go just about anywhere in our State House and you're going to find UIS alums, every single office that you go into.

OK, University of distinction. So I'm not going to read all of these to you. Basically what it says is we're a good school, so we are ranked in U.S. news and World Report. We've been ranked for several years now. We are a great value for least amount of debt, a great college for veterans, a best value college and also we offer a number of online degree programs both at the bachelors.

And the masters level, and so those are always highly ranked. We have great supports for all of our online students. When you're in either a classroom on campus or a classroom online, you're getting the same curriculum taught by the same professors. So they might teach one section face to face earlier that day and they might teach an online section later on in the afternoon. So that just gives you a little bit about our rankings and our value and things like that.