Back in the office after a fantastic (if brief) trip to Boston for the first New Student Reception of the season.  We had a wonderful group of ’19s and P’19s there and it was a terrific evening.

Many thanks to the current students in attendance, who helped provide some tips about how new students can get their best start at Wake Forest. Here’s a sampling of their advice:

Get involved in activities

Be open to trying new things

Time management is key

Use the daylight hours for working (freeing up the evening for social life); one suggested spend 1-2 hours every day in the library working

Use the library resources/schedule personal research sessions

Go to class 🙂

Meet as many people as possible early in the fall

I am still working on collating some of the advice parents supplied to me via the survey a few Daily Deacs ago.  Hope to get to that soon.

Also during my trip, I saw two new announcements about senior administrators:  Suzanne Reynolds, a professor of law and interim dean of the law school, was officially named dean.  Tim Pyatt has been named dean of the ZSR Library.  I have heard dean-elect Reynolds speak before and she is a really compelling person (and very much beloved by law alumni).  Dean-elect Pyatt is new to me, but his work is known by some of my library friends and they seem really enthused about his appointment.  I look forward to getting to know them better.

So that’s the news of last week and we’re caught up to today.  And now I need to call on the Deac family to help us.  The Parent Programs office (where yours truly is housed) is also responsible for asking parents and families to  support the Parents’ Campaign of the Wake Forest Fund.   The Parents’ Campaign provides unrestricted annual support for students and faculty – helping us provide all the extras that make a Wake Forest education so special.  Our fiscal year closes June 30th and we have not yet reached our goal of 2,850 parent/family donors.  But we are getting really close.

Tomorrow we kick off 52 hours of giving – a fun way to make a gift that has a special twist.  I got a preview message from one of my colleagues about it:

“Starting Tuesday June 9 at noon, the first 2,500 donors who make a gift of $52 or more to the fund that never sleeps will receive a custom designed deck of Wake Forest playing cards. And that’s not all. The Alumni Council has agreed to match the first $52 for up to 2,500 gifts, which means an extra $130,000 for the hardest working fund at Wake Forest.”

These playing cards are really cool.  Check out some of the pictures below.  If you make a gift of $52 and above to the Parents’ Campaign of the Wake Forest Fund tomorrow (and are among the first 2,500), you can give your Deac a set of WFU cards that are unlike any they have ever seen.  I would LOVE to see our parent constituency coming out strong to get these cards!  Look for information in your email tomorrow – or starting at noon tomorrow log on to www.wfu.edu and you ought to see plenty of info on the 52 Hours of Giving.

It goes without saying that if you can’t make a $52 gift, please consider a gift of any size!  We are looking for total donors more than anything else and only need a couple hundred parents to make a gift to help us reach our goal!

Normally I don’t talk about money at the Daily Deac but a couple of times a year it gets pretty critical to us.  And let me say thank you in advance.  Our Wake Forest parents are among the most generous in the nation – we were ranked #1 in giving per student this past year in a Voluntary Support for Education survey.  That’s all because of you believing in what we do, and we are so grateful for all that you can help make possible for our students.

— by Betsy Chapman

52 hours cards

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