As a COM Ambassador, some of my favorite activities from the past two years have been the annual Open House events for prospective students. I think part of the reason I love Open House so much is mainly due to the wonderful experience I had back when I visited Boston University for the second time. Being able to go behind the scenes in a way is really eye opening as to how much Boston University and specifically COM itself cares for its students. It is amazing to see how much work the Undergraduate Affairs department and the COM Ambassadors themselves put into Open House in order to ensure that it is the best experience that it can be for potential Terriers.
However, not all of our accepted students are able to make it to an Open House. I am aiming this blog post at all of those students who cannot attend so that they can get a bit of a look into just what happens at our Open House events.
There are definitely some highlights to every Open House that we host, and its definitely very hard to determine what exactly my favorite part is, so I’m just going to go through Open House step by step and talk about what makes it so amazing!
The morning typically begins around 7am, which is definitely the only bad part of the day. However, we move to Tsai auditorium very quickly after that, where we are provided with Starbucks coffee and some fantastic bagels, which really makes up for the fact that we have to wake up before seven a.m. on a Saturday.
From here we move into a variety of presentations. COM’s Dean Fiedler talks to the prospective students and their parents a bit about the school and everything they will encounter here. Then it was time for both Claudia and I to talk to the audience, which was a very fun opportunity. Last year, both of us were just regular ambassadors, but this year as the Coordinators of the program, we were able to get up on stage and help run the show, which was a fantastic experience. As someone who did a lot of public speaking in high school, it was a lot of fun to be able to bring back those skills.
After this we presented the Open House video, which was Full House themed this year, and featured quite a few of our COM Ambassadors. Big shout out to Claudia for shooting that video and putting it together! It was a lot of fun and got a lot of laughs from the audience, and will be online sometime in the next few weeks, so if you want to see it, keep an eye on the COM Ambassador twitter! The video serves as an introduction to all of our COM Ambassadors, who come rushing down the isles an not the stage, where they tell us a bit about who they are.
We then broke into the three different departmental presentations- Journalism, Mass Communication+Advertising+Public Relations (I like to call it MAPs), and Film and Television. These are always a lot of fun, and this was my first time attending the MAPs presentation, and it was very cool learning a bit more about their programs since I’ve ever heard Film and Television presentations before. Though I did miss sitting in on the FTV presentation and seeing all of the cool stuff they show, I think all of the departments do a fantastic job of explaining just what it is that they offer the students.
After the presentations we break down into the student and parents lunches. Its a great chance for students or parents to get to know each other as well as the ambassadors. Its a lot of fun for us to be able to sit down with prospective students and tell them about all of the experiences we have had here in COM.
Next is one of my favorite parts of the day: The student panel. This year we had five students who sat down with us to answer all of the questions that students and parents had to offer. There was a great variety on the panel this year: two seniors, a junior, a sophomore, and a freshman expanding across the various majors that we offer here in COM. It is a great opportunity for students to find out about life here at BU from the perspective of current students.
We end the day with tours of the College of Communication, where all of the prospective students are able to tour the school with our COM ambassadors, which is yet another great way for them to see some of the great things that COM has to offer. They get see the wonderful resources we offer such as Undergraduate Affairs and the Career Development center, as well as some very cool places in COM like the BUTV10 studios.
I would like to end this post by congratulating all of the students accepted into the BU Class of 2020, and if you aren’t able to make Open House and have any questions at all about BU/COM, please feel free to tweet me @kreagsheehan or email me at kreags@bu.edu!
