Juniata College-Colleges That Change Lives

Excerpts from

COLLEGES THAT CHANGE LIVES

think.juniata.edu

Excerpt(s) and “Juniata College” from COLLEGES THAT CHANGE LIVES: 40 SCHOOLS THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT COLLEGES

by Loren Pope, revised by Hilary Masell Oswald, copyright © 1996, 2000, 2006

by Loren Pope; copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Loren Pope.

Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Choosing a college is a deeply personal decision. It is as much about knowing yourself as knowing individual colleges. Are you driven by a sole desire or many interests? Do you want to be a leader on campus amongst a tight-knit community? Do you want to make an impact on the world? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, we believe Juniata is a good fit for you.

Juniata is a welcoming, inclusive community. Students feel the freedom to be who they are and are challenged by professors to accomplish more than they imagined. From traveling the world in a competitive choir and competing in national volleyball tournaments to presenting research at a national conference, students find themselves pursuing opportunities while being encouraged by their peers. The results are alumni who have become leaders within their fields and communities. All of this begins with you, right now.

We are looking for students who are excited about life—students who willingly accept a challenge. Even if you don’t know what you want from your college experience, we want to get to know you better and help you through the discovery stage. Begin your journey now. Meet Juniata College.

Here are a few quick facts to help you start thinking:

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Design your own academic program with two academic advisers 13:1 student faculty ratio Average class size of 17 21 Division III varsity athletic teams 80% of students complete internships 96% of students are working or are in graduate school within six months of graduation Five instrumental ensembles and three choral ensembles Students from 34 different states and 39 different countries 104 different clubs and student organizations And more….

Intrigued by Juniata?

Keep reading to find out more about our community.

PENGUIN BOOKS

COLLEGES THAT CHANGE LIVES LOREN POPE, a Washington newspaperman who led the fight for better schools in rural Loudoun County, Virginia, first began writing about education in a column for the Gannett Newspapers in 1952. His column led to his position as education editor of the New York Times during the height of the college-going chaos of the late fifties started by the GI Bill. As an education journalist and later a top administrator at what is now Oakland University in Michigan, he became deeply concerned with the lack of information on colleges that was available to consumers. He believed that uniformed choices could account for heavy dropout, transfer, and failure rates. His interest was triggered by the poor advice he got for his own son from friends in the then Office of Education.

In 1965, he opened the College Placement Bureau in Washington, D.C., to help families make informed, fruitful choices. Out of his reporting and research came a book, The Right College: How to Get In, Stay In, Get Back In (Macmillan, 1970), and several magazine articles, including the nationally syndicated “Twenty Myths That Can Jinx Your College Choice,” first published in the Washington Post Magazine. Reader’s Digest has sold half a million reprints of its condensation, titled “Facts to Know in Picking a College.”

These articles inspired his second book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That’s Right for You (Penguin, 2007). Colleges That Change Lives, his third and last book, was first released in 1996. Together, these books helped change the way students, parents, and counselors viewed the college-search process. He served as a role model for college admissions officers and challenged institutions to conduct holistic application reviews, where the focus was on the “whole” student, not just a few numbers.

He made a difference in the lives of thousands of students as he counseled them to choose a college for fit, not rank, and to “look beyond the Ivy League” to find faculty who were not just teachers but mentors for life.

His thoughtful, humorous, and sometimes unorthodox approach to college counseling earned him the respect and admiration of generations of college-bound students and their parents, as well as his colleagues in the college admissions profession.

Pope was also known for commissioning the Pope-Leighey House in 1939, designed and constructed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pope, then a copy editor at a Washington newspaper, convinced Wright to build the small house by writing, “There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is for a house created by you. Will you create a house for us? Will you?” Wright responded: “Dear Loren Pope: Of course I am ready to give you a house.”

Loren Pope died on September 23, 2008, at the age of ninety-eight.

HILARY MASELL OSWALD lives in Denver, where she writes about education, architecture and design, and public policy, among other things.

Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, 5280, Mountain Living, Edutopia, and other publications.

Hilary earned a degree in English literature and composition, magna cum laude, from Davidson College and a master of science in journalism, with honors, from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is a former Carnegie-Knight News21 fellow.

Hilary is an avid reader, an average skier, wife to a great and patient guy, and mom to two small children, who are bound for liberal arts colleges— in about fifteen years.

Juniata College Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

J

uniata is not on every high-school senior’s lips, but it deserves to be.

It is an incubator of high achievers and producer of happy alumni,

thanks to its clear mission to help its 1,600 undergraduates discover and sharpen their talents and raise their sights. “Our students don’t always know how good they are,” says Dr. James Lakso, the provost and an economist. “Our faculty does a very good job of elevating students’ goals and expectations.”

To wit: Among its alumni are Dr. William Phillips, corecipient of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, five members of the National Academy of Sciences, and deans at top research universities and medical clinics. They include leading news executives, MTV cinematography award winners, the developer of Teflon, and Dr. William von Liebig, inventor of the Dacron tubing used in blood-vessel and heart replacement. Juniata’s impressive science center is named for him.

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So it’s no surprise that Juniata students express hope and eagerness when they talk about their future. “It feels like the whole school is set up just to make sure we succeed,” says a senior from New Jersey. “We’re learning what we need to learn, and our professors are always saying, ‘Did you hear about that internship?’ or ‘I have this colleague who needs a research assistant this summer. Want to go?’”

Experiential opportunities are top notch at Juniata. If you visit (and you should), conduct this little experiment: Ask any student you meet about internships, study abroad, and research opportunities. It’s almost guaranteed you’ll hear an impressive and fascinating list of such experiences from anyone you meet here. (And you’ll get to experience one of Juniata’s best qualities: a friendly, enthusiastic student body.)

The backbone of learning here is a broad liberal arts curriculum that encourages interdisciplinary study. Juniata students don’t declare majors. Instead, they have Programs of Emphasis (POEs). A student can choose a “designated” POE—which works like a traditional major with requirements determined by departments—or an individualized POE, an interdisciplinary program that the student designs with input from faculty. About a third of students choose this route, which gives them chances to explore and make connections among seemingly disparate topics.

And each student gets guidance from not one but two advisers. One is a professor in her POE; the other can be a second professor or a beloved staff member. The system underscores the college’s emphasis on students: The whole community exists to help them achieve.

The unofficial mantra on campus is “challenge and support.” Professors’ expectations are high, and even if a student arrives without much selfmotivation, the campus culture will strengthen it. “People want to do well here. I don’t think there are any students who are bored or not paying

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attention,” says a junior from Pennsylvania. “I just don’t know anyone who isn’t excited about what they’re learning. It’s so different from high school—awesomely different.” A student who says he was a mediocre student at a middling public high school adds, “If high school had been like Juniata, I would have been the valedictorian.”

The source of this spirit is teachers’ interest in students and their work.

As at other colleges in this book, Juniata’s faculty is committed to improving its teaching methods. Professors share ideas informally and visit one another’s classes to get ideas and give feedback. They also have brown-bag lunches regularly, during which they share ideas about what works in their classes and what doesn’t. “There’s no fear of reprisal,” Dr. Lakso says, because everyone shares the same goal. By 2011, the college had raised nearly one million dollars for a new Center for Teaching and Learning, where professors will collaborate to keep improving their teaching.

This emphasis is important for undergraduates: At large research universities, many of which don’t value teaching the way small liberal arts colleges do, professors might never discuss best practices in teaching. On almost every campus in this book, professors mention how disappointed their dissertation committees were when as newly minted PhDs they declared their intention to teach—a reflection of teaching’s low status at many research universities. Such places are good at creating new knowledge, but they aren’t nearly as committed to teaching or mentoring undergraduates. At Juniata and places like it, teachers who are very good want to get even better, and you cannot underestimate the influence of talented, passionate teachers on students of all types.

Juniata students feel this commitment deeply. They rave about their professors, often letting their conversation veer off into an exchange about specific teachers: “You have to take a class with him!” or

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“Our class is going to her house for dinner this week!” There seems to be a healthy balance of affection and respect among professors and students.

And the whole campus feels like a genuinely friendly place. Students greet one another as they pass on the sidewalks; the chatter in the cafeteria is lively; professors and students chat casually in hallways. It’s no wonder the most common answer by far to a question about what they love best about Juniata is “community.” Some students even theorize that the college’s small-town location fosters that sense of camaraderie in a way that a spot in a big city might not.

Juniata’s home is Huntingdon, a town of about 6,500 people in central Pennsylvania’s pretty Allegheny Mountains. If you’re up early—try it at least once when you’re a college student—you might catch the fog rolling off the hills to blanket the campus. The college is close to Huntingdon’s downtown core, blocks of restaurants, bars, shops, and small businesses.

It’s also close to outdoor recreational sites, including thousands of miles of hiking and biking trails and the area’s impressive Raystown Lake, with its 118 miles of shoreline. Several students mention that they manage the stress of college life by heading off for a day of fishing and swimming in the warm months and cross-country skiing in the winter.

About 60 percent of Juniata’s 1,600 students come from Pennsylvania, but the student body represents thirty-seven states and thirty-eight foreign countries—a number that has grown in the last ten years. About 70 percent of applicants are accepted; the middle 50 percent of them have scored between 1080 and 1280 on the SAT (critical reading and math) and had an average high-school GPA of 3.75.

Juniata owns and operates a 385-acre field station on the lake, about a thirty-minute drive from campus. The field station is an ideal spot for hands-on learning, and professors from seven different departments, particularly in the sciences, use it regularly for classes. The college

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maintains a fleet of five powerboats and a slew of canoes, and the property’s buildings include a multipurpose learning center and two residential lodges, where students stay as part of the Sense of Place semester. This program, hosted by the environmental studies department, gives a very small group of students an intimate look at the region’s environmental, social, and ecological issues and how they’re connected.

The field station is only one part of Juniata’s strong science program.

Among scientists and scholars (and graduate schools), Juniata has an excellent and well-deserved reputation in the sciences that stretches back decades. The equipment is state-of-the-art and—this is an important distinction—available for student use. The science building was designed to foster student-professor collaboration. An example: Study areas adjoin faculty offices, so students can ask questions as they work on their homework or analyze lab results. “We try to encourage students, to model for them what it means to be a scientist in the liberal arts context, and that means interacting quite a lot,” says Dr. Richard Hark, chair of the chemistry department. “This is a collegial place, and that collegiality extends to relationships with students.” About 75 percent of chemistry majors go on to graduate school, making Juniata fourth in the nation in the percentage of graduates earning PhDs in chemistry.

The prehealth tracks, including premed, prevet, and predental, are just as strong. Not only are the courses excellent preparation for entrance exams and professional school, but Juniata also does a very good job advising these students and helping them discern what they’d like to do.

For example, every prehealth student shadows a professional in the field because the experience helps her understand if the work appeals to her.

If she decides it does, Juniata has excellent acceptance rates: In 2011, 100 percent of students who applied to dental school were accepted, as were 75 percent of students who applied to med school, 100 percent of vet-school applicants, 100 percent of physical therapy applicants, and

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100 percent of students who applied to public-health programs. It’s important to note that because Juniata is a small school, these pools of students can be quite small, so the numbers can skew significantly from year to year. (If there are only two applicants to vet school and one gets in, the acceptance rate drops to 50 percent.) But a close look at Juniata’s acceptance rates over many years shows that it has long been a jumpingoff point for many health professionals.

Better still, Juniata’s culture of support extends even to the prehealth sciences, notorious at other places for being cutthroat. “We never slam kids. If they have bad grades, we find out why,” says Dr. Debra KirchhofGlazier, director of the health professions program. “Every prehealth kid gets the same support from us.” If a student’s grades suggest he won’t get into medical, vet, or dental school, but he wants to try, the committee will advise him as thoughtfully as it does the highest-performing candidates.

And for the few students who aren’t admitted, Dr. Kirchhof-Glazier and her colleagues are very good at suggesting other paths within the healthsciences field.

Dr. Kirchhof-Glazier sounds like her colleagues in other departments when she says, “I know a lot of people [in my discipline], so if a kid wants to research, we make it happen.” Juniata’s standing internships include a 240-hour stint with a group of family physicians in Altoona, about forty minutes from campus, where students can learn alongside medical residents and even spend some time with the local hospital’s trauma team; a paid pediatric internship in the summer with a Juniata alumna; and a nine-day intensive internship in January at a nearby hospital, where students can observe surgeries and shadow a range of specialists.

All of these features should be enough to make any student considering health sciences look closely at Juniata. But here’s the icing on the cake: Juniata believes so strongly in the value of studying abroad that even students on the health-sciences track can go abroad for a full year. The

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college has worked out a smart, careful plan for these students so they finish the professional-school pre-requisites and submit applications on time. Students can’t be more effusive about this opportunity because they say they couldn’t find another college that was as supportive of their desire to go abroad. “I knew [when I was looking for colleges] that college might be the only time in my life I could go live somewhere else as a student, not a tourist,” says a sophomore premed student. “Every other school sort of acted like it was a huge inconvenience for them to support me, and then I got to Juniata, and someone actually said to me, ‘You’re going to be a better doctor if you’ve lived among people who aren’t like you and if you’ve faced challenges that make you think creatively. We think every future doctor should go abroad.’ I was blown away by that kind of thinking. But now I know that’s Juniata. It’s all about possibility here. It’s all about people saying, ‘What are your biggest dreams? Let’s see how we can help you get there.’”

In keeping with Juniata’s commitment to experiential learning, the college’s study-abroad program is another of its crown jewels. It has developed thirty-three exchange programs with universities in sixteen countries, not only sending Juniata students and faculty abroad but also bringing international students and professors to campus, opening up opportunities for horizon-expanding learning and conversation. The exchange model also means that any student’s financial aid travels with him or her; a student doesn’t pay any more money to attend classes in Japan than she does to attend classes in Huntingdon (with the exception of a plane ticket). For students who need funding to help pay for travel, the college offers grant money.

It might be easy to assume Juniata’s only strength is science. Not true.

Education majors rave about how much time they get in classrooms long before they have to do their student teaching. Politics majors swear they have the most invigorating classes on campus. Students interested in digital media show off the college’s digital media studio, where students

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create the majority of publications and videos for promoting the college and on-campus events.

Business and economics students brag about the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, which rewards students for developing businesses. The center offers loans, grants, and help for students developing business plans, and the college even owns a building—a former elementary school—that provides space for students to work.

But the most fanatical students might be in the theater department. In true Juniata fashion, the program is not what you might expect. There are only two theater professors; the rest of the teachers are professionals who come to campus for short periods of time—up to six or seven weeks—to provide intensive instruction. As a result, the program exposes students to a broad swath of artistic expression and skills: mime, circus arts, acting for the camera, improvisation, dance and movement, set design, lighting, costume design—the list goes on. “Students get to hone what kind of artist they are by the time they leave,” says Kate Clarke, a theater professor.

Plus, the department does a lot of “devised work”—new plays developed alongside students. “There are a lot of opportunities to create,” Ms. Clarke adds. Her students nod eagerly.

Alumni have long been supportive of Juniata, thankful for the ways it vaulted them into lives more enriching than they could have dreamed as eighteen-year-olds. You might not find a more representative story than this one, from a 1992 graduate who was a first-generation college student.

He’s now a physician and playwright who produces plays that address issues raised during his life as a doctor.

He says he came to Juniata when he was seventeen and his family was “devastated emotionally and financially” by the death of his father at age forty. He chose Juniata because it was close to home and because it had an excellent med-school acceptance rate.

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“What I had not expected,” he says, “was the degree to which Juniata would change my life and enable me to make use of my grief.” He credits the college, more than any other piece of his education or medical training, with teaching him skills he needs to deal with the “triumphs and tragedies” of his profession. “Because of my experience in theater at Juniata, I was better able to understand myself, my family, and my future patients. . . . I have no doubt in my mind that Juniata College forever changed my life and transformed me from a grieving adolescent into a medical doctor who has never forgotten the lessons learned in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. I remain forever grateful to the mentoring and challenges that Juniata presented to me. I feel almost blessed to have found such an extraordinary place.”

Enrollment Philosophy The Admission Committee encourages students to apply to Juniata if they demonstrate the desire, motivation, and maturity to benefit from a four-year private college experience. The Admission Committee places the most emphasis on a student’s high school transcript. In addition, activities, standardized tests, community involvement, and all the things that make up the student’s life are important in the review process. Juniata seeks a broad student population base that includes a wide geographic and cultural representation from a variety of social and economic backgrounds.

The College reserves the right to determine which applicants will be admitted. The selection of candidates is made without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, creed, disability, or national origin.

Early Decision and Early Action Information Juniata’s Early Decision and Early Action admission options follow the standard definition as developed by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC).

Early Decision is the application process in which students make a commitment to a first-choice institution where, if admitted, they will definitely enroll. Should a student who applies for financial aid not be offered an award that makes attendance possible, the student may decline the offer of admission and be released from the Early Decision commitment.

Early Action application deadlines are appropriate for students who complete their application well before the Regular Decision deadline and would like to receive an admission decision earlier in the college decision process.

If you have questions or would like to discuss whether or not you might be an Early Decision or Early Action candidate, please call your enrollment counselor at 877-586-4282 or www.juniata.edu/counselors.

Financial Planning and Need-Based Grants The Office of Student Financial Planning partners with individual families to assist them through the financial planning process. Students are encouraged to speak with our financial planning counselors before and throughout the financial planning process. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) should be completed by all U.S. citizens and permanent residents applying for need-based financial aid. The filing timeframe is between October 1 and March 1. The deadline for completion is May 1. Need-based aid is available for qualified applicants through the Juniata Scholarship Fund, state and federal programs, as well as other payment plans and financing options. Juniata’s code number for the FAFSA is 003279.

Contact the Office of Student Financial Planning if you have questions about the financial aid application process at financialplanning@juniata.edu or 814-641-3142.

Academic Scholarships Juniata students have many opportunities to earn academic scholarships. The decision to award the many scholarships available to incoming students begins with the application for admission.

Determining factors include cumulative GPA, rigor of the courses taken, and the academic reputation of the high school or college at which the work was completed. While there are minimum achievements specifically outlined at www.juniata.edu/scholarships to ensure consideration, Juniata reviews all academic, extracurricular, and community experiences in making final award decisions.

Our alumni, local and regional businesses, and other supporters provide generous funding to Juniata so that we have resources for a variety of scholarships. All students are considered for academic merit-based scholarships that are guaranteed each year, for four years, as long as the student makes academic progress. Last year, 100 percent of families who applied for need-based financial aid received it.

Competitive scholarships for outstanding academic achievement are also available. The Top Scholars Award is a scholarly discussion competition that provides an additional scholarship. For students interested in studying abroad, the Eagles Abroad Scholarships in French, German, Russian, and Spanish fund an international summer immersion at the end of the freshman year and a semester or year abroad during the junior year. Students who are National Merit, National Achievement, or National Hispanic finalists are eligible for an additional $2,500 scholarship.

Our campus offerings and wide community create a strong and vital educational space. Choosing Juniata means not only benefiting from that environment but committing to enhancing it. For that reason, we view ourselves as partners with students and families in making our opportunities a reality.

To begin a personalized financial planning conversation, complete the Net Price Calculator on our website at www.juniata.edu/ admission/cost.

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