It’s May 1st today, and so begins what I think of as the Janus month in college administrators’ lives. If my memory serves from my Classics classes, Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings. He is shown with two faces: one looking behind, and one looking ahead.

As we look behind, we see the achievements of the Class of 2020. They arrived four years ago as newbies, learned in all sorts of ways (in and out of the classroom), and hopefully grew into the people they are meant to be. And we will celebrate them twice: once for Virtual Conferring of Degrees on May 18th, as well as for in-person Commencement on October 31st, as Dr. Hatch wrote yesterday.

To honor the Class of 2020, I spent the better part of the morning down the most delightful rabbit hole. Every May, the Old Gold and Black, our student newspaper, runs its Graduation Tabloid issue, which features profiles of exceptional graduating seniors and a wonderful letter by editor Olivia Field (’21).

If you want to feel good about the state of our future – and right now, who doesn’t need a dose of something good? – read the profiles of these students and see what kind of amazing, capable, kind, and creative young men and women are about to launch into the world. And while they have picked a few dozen #WFU20 grads to feature, I would argue that I could randomly pick students walking around campus whose stories would be just as compelling and impressive. P’20s, you have much to be proud of in your students.

Now let’s think about Janus looking ahead to the Class of 2024. Today was the deposit deadline for accepted students who will enter Wake Forest in the fall. So we look forward to bringing a whole new cadre of amazing young people to campus as Wake Foresters.

The May ritual for new students is the launching of newstudents.wfu.edu, the New Students website for the Class of 2024. This site will be their guidepost for most of this summer for all items related to Orientation and becoming a member of our community.

There is a section of the New Students website that is just for parents and families. I need to beg your patience because some of it is still being updated, including our key dates table and First Year Parent and Family Calendar (COVID-19 definitely threw our March and April schedule off, when normally we would have been finalizing all content on the site.) So please know that this is a living website and new content will be added as the summer progresses. We also made the strategic choice for the family calendar and Forestry 101 (which is normally a hard-bound book) to be electronic only due to fact that we needed to stay nimble and did not want to publish dates that might have needed to change due to COVID.

A few more news items to note as we close out the week:

Residence Life and Housing send a message today to residents of Polo Hall, North Campus Apartments 6-10, and Student Apartements A about their move out process; read it here.

A similar message went out to residents of Bostwick and Johnson; read it here.

We have received inquiries from students about rental textbooks and the need to return them (particularly because they had received a ‘reminder to return’ email that was probably scheduled at the start of the semester pre-COVID and went out automatically). We are working on a process for rental textbook return – both for students coming back for self-move-out as well as for students who are not coming back to move out. We don’t have final details, but I will share them as soon as I have them. For now, tell your students not to panic about due dates; we know people can’t get here yet.

An opportunity for you: WAKECommunities and Wake NOW (Network of Women) have organized Wake Workout Week, 5 days of virtual fitness classes taught by Wake Forest alumni. It will take place next week, May 4 – 8 and is open to alumni, students, families, faculty, staff, and friends. Currently there are 11 different classes that you can register for, taught by alumni in cities across the US. Alumni, are offering these classes free of charge, but participants are encouraged to donate to the Wake Forest Crisis Relief Fund if they are able to do so.

In case you missed it, Student Government donated its unspent spring budget to the Wake Forest Crisis Response Fund. There is also a matching program set up by the Interfraternity Council to encourage members of the Wake Forest Greek community to donate to the Wake Forest Crisis Response Fund.

I am rejoicing in all good news I possibly can, and invite you to join me in celebrating too 🙂

Stay well, Daily Deacdom!

 

— by Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)

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