NEW YORK—Some members of Fordham’s class of 2009 will say goodbye to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Alamo and the Colorado Rocky Mountains to attend the University they say already feels like home.
“When I visited Fordham it instantly felt like a place I could call home – both the school and the community,” said incoming freshman Sarah Weynand of San Antonio, Texas. “I didn’t get that feeling at any other school that I visited.”
Weynand, who scored a perfect 1,600 on the SAT, graduated from Incarnate Word High School and is enrolled in the honors program at Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC). Coming to New York from the Lonestar State, she said she is excited about attending college in the Big Apple where she can see Broadway shows and meet people from all over the world.
Fordham’s incoming freshman class reflects the increasing geographic diversity of the University’s student body, with students coming from as far away as Taiwan, South Africa, Bangladesh and the U.K. This year’s incoming class was also selected from among the largest undergraduate applicant pool in the University’s history. Fordham received 15,200 applications, which is a 7 percent increase over last year and four times larger than it was in the 1990s.
Weynand said the small class sizes were also a key factor in her decision to choose Fordham over major scholarship offers from New York University and the University of Southern California. She said she was impressed with the amount of small classrooms, which she sees as a sign that she will receive one-on-one attention from the Fordham faculty.
The individual attention or cura personalis — the Latin word for “personal care” which is a hallmark of a Jesuit education — is another reason many of the brightest high-school seniors choose Fordham. The academic quality was considerable for this incoming class, which continued an upward trend of increasing SAT scores and numbers of students ranked in the top of their class.
“This has been one of the most competitive admissions cycles in the University’s history,” said John Buckley, assistant vice president of Undergraduate Enrollment. The mean SAT score as of Aug. 17 was 1209, up from 1187 last year. Additionally, 35 percent of the incoming class graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class, 74 percent graduated in the top 25 percent.
Mia Mata, an incoming freshman from J.K. Mullen High School in Denver, Colo., wasn’t as concerned with these statistics as she was with what she saw during a visit to campus last year. She said Fordham already feels like home and added that the faculty and staff feel like family.
“The enthusiasm of students and everyone who works there – I could tell they really and truly cared,” said Mata, who is enrolled in Fordham College at Rose Hill.
