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Freshman orientation begins at Wittenberg

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Wittenberg University orientation assitants, from left, Jacque Cooper, Samantha Kimm and Katherine Hueter helped students during move-in day Thusday, Aug. 20, 2009.Staff photo by Marshall Gorby

By Kelly Mori, Staff Writer Updated 7:57 AM Friday, August 21, 2009

Linda and Paul Brouard had decided by 8 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 20, which one of them would drive when they made the 700-mile trip from Springfield back home to Guilford, Conn.

“Oh, he’s driving, because I’m going to be sobbing all of the way,” Linda Brouard said.

The couple were among hundreds of parents who were dropping off college students during move-in day at Wittenberg University.

Linda Brouard said the drive home without her daughter, Beata, will be an emotional one but she said it was comforting to know Beata would walk the same campus she did as a Wittenberg student in the late 1960s.

“I loved this place,” Linda Bouard said.

Her daughter agreed.

“I visited 14 other colleges, but I fell in love with Wittenberg,” said Beata, who will be majoring in pre-med with a minor in music.

By 8 a.m. a steady stream of cars was making its way along Alumni Way as more than 200 faculty, staff and student volunteers, including Wittenberg President Mark Erickson, helped unload cars and carry students’ belongings into residence halls.

Freshman enrollment is down from last year, which is a national trend, Erickson said. But with only 11 fewer enrollments, Wittenberg is not complaining, he said. “And our retention is up.”

Of the nearly 550 members of the freshman class, the number of local and minority students is up over last year, said Ryan Maurer, university spokesman.

“It is a goal of the university in the strategic plan to increase minority representation,” he said.

At 1 p.m. those new students gathered at Commencement Hollow for the beginning of their three-day orientation.

It will be four years before members of the freshman class meet together again at Commencement Hollow — when they attend their commencement ceremony in 2013.

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