Fall Semester Generates Excitement

While our campus buzzes with excitement and activity throughout the year, our intensity levels begin to rise significantly as the fall semester approaches. A flurry of events began this week and will continue through the start of fall classes on Monday, Aug. 18.

This week, we hosted two sessions of New Student Orientation. Next week, we will begin working with our high school students planning to take college-level classes through our Concurrent Enrollment, Secondary Technical Center, and Academies of West Memphis programs. On Aug. 11 and 12, we’ll have regular registration for folks who haven’t enrolled already. We can’t help but be excited about the new or ongoing opportunities our students will have when classes resume.

The orientation process is a great start toward the first day of classes. Talking and working with first-time college students, as well as those attending our institution for the first time, is always an interesting proposition. Sometimes their stories can be enlightening and encouraging. Other times, they are a little more sobering.

One student, who lives in Memphis, told an MSCC employee that she decided to leave the region to attend a school a few hours north of here. To the employee’s credit, he didn’t chastise her for her lapse in judgment but instead listened with interest. By the end of her first year, the student was frustrated with the school and her degree program because she didn’t seem to be progressing toward her goal. When she returned home for the summer, she looked into Mid-South Community College and found that she could get exactly what she needs at our institution. She is now registered for fall classes and is excited about finding her future at MSCC.

Another student who had attended a couple of institutions of higher learning in our area couldn’t keep from smiling when she neared the end of her orientation experience at Mid-South. She spoke glowingly of our registration process and talked about how organized our effort was. She had been told by some of her friends who had attended MSCC to expect an efficient trek through our system, but she still seemed amazed at how easy it was to navigate our process. I don’t know how long her smile lasted, but she still had it when she walked out our doors.

Not all of the stories brought smiles to our faces. A young man who enrolled in our Respiratory Care program explained that he did so because he had lost his job and needed to find a new career. There is certainly no humor in that situation, but we can take pride in the fact that we have a program that provides him some promise for the future.

We invest a great deal of time, thought, and effort into making our processes as easy as possible because we understand that a little bit of encouragement goes a long way. Before every orientation or registration session, we emphasize to our employees the importance of treating every student with a smile, respect, and a caring attitude. That sometimes means answering the same question in an encouraging manner for 100 students over the course of a week, but that’s what we do. That’s our culture.

At the end of the day, we want our students to think of MSCC as a second home, a place where they are nurtured, encouraged, challenged, and motivated to reach their God-given potential. We firmly believe there is not a better place on the planet to experience higher education, and we guarantee that no place on earth cares more about their students’ future than we do. I encourage you to put us to the test by registering for the fall semester.

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