Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part II

On this Thanksgiving Day, the Office of Parent Programs wishes you and your loved ones a wonderful day.  May it be filled with smiles, and good food, and love, and laughter, and memories you will cherish for years to come.

And because today is about gratitude, we’d like to share a few of the things we are grateful for today – and every day.

We are thankful for your students.  They bring a wonderful vibrancy to our campus.  Their youth and exuberance is catching, and I swear they keep the rest of us young by our contact with them.

We are thankful for their intellectual curiosity, their school spirit, the way they volunteer to help others.  They will be the leaders of the world in their time, and they will be ready.

We value the diverse perspectives and backgrounds our students bring to our community, because we all have things we can learn from each other, especially when they have walked a different path.  It is a great blessing to have artists, and scientists, and athletes, and poets, and budding entrepreneurs, international students as well as students from all over our country, and students of every different  background.  The collective mix of the Wake Forest community is beautiful.

We are grateful for our faculty.  They are at the center of the wonderful intellectual journey called college, and it is through them that our students learn and are inspired.  We are proud that our faculty not only teach our students, but want to get to know them as people.

We are thankful for learning.  Our faculty and students make discoveries together that will bring new ideas and solutions to our world.   Across every discipline and every program, this campus creates, explores, discovers, and then shares it with the world.  And that is a great thing.

We are grateful for all our other colleagues on campus – staff and administrators alike, from every division and every position on the org chart.  Each of us has our own role to play to help make Wake Forest what it is, and our collective commitment to the common good on this campus is remarkable.  Many of these people do amazing work in ways that are never public, and are not recognized, except by the people whose lives they touch most.  We thank you.

We are grateful to work in such a beautiful place.  Every day, we see the gorgeous landscape of trees and flowers, the beautiful Georgian architecture, and the incredible charm of this campus.  We are grateful for the growth of our city of Winston-Salem and all it offers us (chronicled nicely here in the US Airways Magazine).

We are grateful to our Wake Forest extended family – parents, grandparents, and guardians.  Thank you for entrusting your most precious gifts – your children – to us for their education.

We are grateful to know all of you that we have met through Orientation, New Student Receptions, other regional events, through phone calls and emails.  It is a pleasure for us to help you and your students when you need it.  And we are eternally grateful for all the ways you give back to Wake Forest.

Thank you for being part of our lives – and for letting us be part of yours!

Recent Posts

Archives