A
Taste of Eastern Michigan Today
By:
Arturo Rodriguez Jr.
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| Eastern Michigan's original building; constructed in 1852. |
For the past five years, averages of 22,878 students have been
enrolled at EMU. About 18,000 of those
students are undergraduates, and the other 5,000 students are graduate
students. The university has evolved into one of the better business
schools in the nation, but still stays true to its roots as a being one of
the nation’s premier colleges of education.
Kelley Wu, an admissions advisor at Eastern Michigan said that all
different kinds of students are currently enrolled at EMU.
“We see a variety of students here,” Wu said. “I
speak to students coming out of high school, students still in high school,
students that started, stopped and came back. We have students of all different
ethnicities.”
Wu has been an admissions advisor since May of 2009
and graduated from Eastern Michigan with
a bachelor’s degree in Business
Marketing in 2008.
“I had a great time at Eastern,” Wu said. “I was
always eager to finish and leave, but I came back. I liked Eastern so much. I
saw they were hiring so I decided to apply, and I got the job.”
She is from Michigan, as is many students that
attend EMU. According to CollegeBoard.com,
87 percent of the student population at Eastern
Michigan is from Michigan, and the other 13 percent are out-of-state
students.
Eastern
Michigan has expanded its education beyond the state lines
of Michigan, offering study abroad opportunities for their students and has had
a steady enrollment of about 800 international
students for the past five years.
Sophomore Adrienne Smotherman is from Detroit and graduated
from Cass Technical High School in
2010.
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| This is a picture of newly remodeled Pray-Harrold. |
“Eastern is real diverse,” Smotherman said. “It’s a
mixture of every from all over the place. But that’s what I expect from
college.”
To an extent, Smotherman and Wu have a point.
However, a majority of the university is either Black or White. According to
CollegeBoard.com, 86 percent of EMU’s student population for first-year
students is either of White or Black decent.
Sophomore Noah Gebhard is from Chelsea, Michigan and
graduated from Chelsea High School
in 2010. Gebhard said Chelsea is a small town.
“There’s a
lot of inner-city kids here at EMU,” Gebhard said. “It’s kind of new to me. I’m
from a small farm town.”
EMU averages about 1,700 students who went to high
school outside Michigan compared to an average of 20,000 students who are from
Michigan.
Gebhard said: “I put a lot of time researching the
school before I came here. I know people who were going here and some that came
here and graduated. No real surprises; I got what I expected out of it.”
“I came to EMU for the education program,” Gebhard
said. “I want to be a teacher. EMU is the teaching
school of the nation. If you want to be a teacher this is the school where
you want to be.”
He said he likes that EMU is a bigger school than
what he is used to, but enjoys the fact that Eastern Michigan is still somewhat a smaller campus compared to
Michigan State and UofM.
Eastern Michigan was the first school in the nation
to offer a program to train teachers of the disabled. It was also the first
school to offer a program in library services.
Smotherman said she chose EMU because the tuition
was cheaper than the other schools she applied to; for her, EMU was her last
choice.
The in-state tuition and fees for EMU is at around $8,000
per year, costing $247 per credit hour. The out-of-state tuition and fees is at
around $23,000 per year, costing $727 per hour. This does not include room and
board, books and supplies, personal expenses, and transportation expenses.
Smotherman said, “When you think of the comparison
of fees at other schools, EMU is really not expensive; it’s affordable.”
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| This is a picture of EMU's new science complex. |
Despite the growth of enrollment over the past 160
plus years, the university gets a bad rap education-wise and is frowned upon by
a good amount of students currently attending EMU and those who don’t.
Gebhard said: “It pisses me off that people think
this way. It’s hard to be proud of where you go to school when people think of
EMU as a joke.”
According to CollegeBoard.com,
about 43 percent of the students that attend EMU their first year had a GPA in
high school between 2.0 to 2.99.
Smotherman said: “At Eastern Michigan, you can have a 2.0 GPA out of high school and you
will still be accepted here. It’s a good and bad thing. Eastern is still a good
school; they think it’s easier, but I think the classes here are just as strict
as other colleges. Some people might mess up in high school and get to start
off college fresh.”
Gebhard said, “You’ve got to work hard here, just
like you’ve got to work hard somewhere else.”
All in all, EMU is still a legitimate university.
They have Division-1 athletics in a multitude of sports including: basketball,
football, women’s soccer, women’s gymnastics, men’s wrestling, track and field,
baseball, softball, women’s tennis, golf, women’s volleyball, women’s rowing,
and cross country. They even have a good number of club sports teams that
compete on a national level.
Tiara Hudson, a junior biology major said EMU has
lived up to expectations.
“I expected EMU to be different from high school, and
it has been,” Hudson said. “I expected a lot of fun, but hard work at the same
time.”
Hudson is from Ann Arbor, and she said she always
knew she would come to EMU.
“My experience here has been good,” Hudson said. “I’ve
met a lot of people. I still keep in touch with people I had class with.
Overall, it’s been a good experience.”
Eastern
Michigan may not jump out at you like Michigan State or
University of Michigan, but let us not forget that an education past high
school nowadays is invaluable. It is what you make of your experience in
college, and how you use the knowledge you obtain to better your situation in
the “real world.”
Hudson said it best.
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| EMU's campus in 2003. |
more pictures of EMU
-Theses final two photos were taken from EMU's website and placed onto my blog.
