Choi Wing Kong ’15, Staff Writer
“800 new freshmen are coming,” has become a popular slogan for Merrimack College this year. As we all know, there are about 800 new freshmen enrolled for Fall 2013. This number does not include the number of transfer students this year as well. This is the first time Merrimack College experienced an extensive amount of new students coming for a semester. Moreover, in the seeable future, Merrimack College plans enroll a larger number of students continuously.
“We are growing, as you can see the constructions in campus, we are not going to become a large school, but we still trying to increase students population to grow the school,” Sarah (Whittall) Mackler, the Assistant Director of Admissions of Merrimack, says. Merrimack is ready to welcome the new students. Since students with on campus housing is always a growing concern where there are a lack of rooms can be offered. Junior and senior students will be asked to move out if there is any storage of rooms. In the beginning of this year, Merrimack started to build new buildings to satisfy students’ needs. “The road was in constructions everywhere last year that really troubled me. It was detoured everywhere, but now, it surprised me when the first time I came back on September 2nd, campus looks really nice and organized,” says Junfeng Tong, an international student from China. Now, it is not hard to find out that there are several new students dormitories available this year.
There is also a marketing team at Merrimack College to publicize the reputation of the school. For example, the consultants would go and visit high schools students and introduce Merrimack’s facilities to them. There were a lot of campus-visiting days last semester at Merrimack where students and their families were invited to visit the campus and learn more about what Merrimack has to offer. Although the majority of the population at Merrimack are local American students, Merrimack also targets to accept a number of international students to make it diversified and globalized.
Since there is an increased number of a student, number of professors has also increased. “There were job posting up for new professors,” says Mackler. Merrimack not only focuses on the facilities but also cares about the teaching quality. Unlike other colleges, small class sizes are one of the distinguishing features of the our school’s culture, usually the class size is capped off at 20 students.
So far, Merrimack is on the right path and the increase of students has not caused any negative effects yet. “Everything is positive now,” says Mackler. Merrimack College will continually work to attract more qualified students to be involved into the community and become a more global well-know college.
