#BELLARMINEBOUND Learning Communities (built around cohorts of students studying a common discipline) kick in even before school starts. Beginning this year, freshman students are all reading the same book: the NPR collection of essays This I Believe. And recently, Bellarmine has creatively used social media to make incoming freshmen feel like family before they even get to campus. (More on that in a moment.) The Bellarmine admission team is clearly doing something right. Enrollment and graduation rates have risen dramatically in recent years. Freshman enrollment has grown from 409 students in 2004 to 606 last year, according to Mike Rudolph, assistant director of institutional research. At this writing (in August), a whopping 684 freshmen were enrolled for this fall. Likewise, Bellarmine awarded 578 degrees (undergraduate and graduate) in 2004, and 876 last year. (For those of you keeping score at home, there were 42 graduating seniors in Mr. O’Regan’s 1954 Pioneer Class.) One incoming freshman this fall is Molly Badgett, an accounting major from Louisville who attended St. Agnes School and Manual High School. Bellarmine was always at the top of Ms. Badgett’s college list because her father, Peyton Badgett ’77, who died when she was two, loved the school. “My dad went to Bellarmine and he had a fantastic time there,” she said. “I’d see the beautiful campus and I heard about how it was such a good school with a great reputation. Small classes really attracted me.” She also knew she wanted to go to an in-state school. “I wanted to be close to home,” she said. “My mom and I are very close.” So Ms. Badgett was already a fan of Bellarmine before the marketing materials started rolling in and she rolled through the Highlands on the trolley last October. But there was still the problem of cost. That’s where Bellarmine’s financial-aid options came to the rescue. She applied for and received scholarships, including a Beeny Residence Life Scholarship that will allow her to live on campus. (All BU applicants who complete the FAFSA automatically receive financial aid offers, and 100 percent of them get some form of assistance.) “I don’t think I would have been able to go to Bellarmine without the scholarships,” she said. “It was very generous.” By March, she’d decided she wanted to go to Bellarmine but she hadn’t yet settled on her major. Then Dr. Audrey Gramling, the chair of the Accounting Department, mailed her a “giant accounting packet,” she said. “As I was looking at it, my mom would say, ‘It’s something to look into; keep your mind open.’ So I decided to set up a meeting with Dr. Gramling. I talked to her and I said, ‘I like the idea of working in business, but I don’t want to crunch numbers all day. Calculus scares me and I don’t want to be stuck behind a desk all day.’ And she explained to me that accounting majors go on to do multiple things, and it’s one of the best gateway degrees to go into business. She really persuaded me that it would be a good investment in my future.” Even though Ms. Badgett was still in high school, she was careerminded. “Bellarmine’s accounting program and the business school in general have a very good reputation to help students meet future employers,” she said. “They even have the Bellarmine University 30 BELLA RMINE MAGAZINE “We haven’t even started our freshman year but we’re already being drawn all together.”
Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2013_Web
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