I hope you have been having a productive and exciting summer. While some of you were away, our classrooms and labs were filled with students developing or refining their skills. Students embarked on faculty-led fieldwork, from excavations in Utah and Greece to solar energy research in Poland. Hundreds more participated in on-campus research projects and pursued area internships through such programs as our Jaggar Community Fellows Program and McDonell Fellowship Program. 

At our Garden City campus, enthusiastic K-12 students have been developing their athletic talents in sports camps, while the labs and classrooms have been buzzing with passionate emerging scientists and writers. You'll read more below about our Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat. In partnership with UNESCO, we undertook a terrific summer conference that brought over 300 high school student activists from around the world to campus as part of a global summit at the United Nations. The students participated in a Shark Tank-style competition to bring forth ideas on how we can further our commitment to sustainability.

At Orientation, we introduced over 1,000 freshman Panthers to our community. Thank you to the orientation leaders, affectionately known as OLs, whose enthusiasm got the new students off to a great start, to the advisers who worked relentlessly to ensure that everyone received an exciting and rich academic program, and to the faculty and staff, who showed these new students how motivated we are for them to join us. Many of our freshmen have chosen to participate in our signature Freshman Community Action Program (FCAP). FCAP introduces incoming students to our focus on service to the community--a focus that shows who we are and what we believe. This will be our largest freshman class ever, and I know we will double our collective efforts to ensure our students' success.