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Story and photos by Carina Julig, junior (Jour)

This year’s CMCI Connect event included more than 300 students, all eager to make friends, meet professors and kick off their college careers. The annual event serves as a welcome for freshman students and others transferring to the college.

“Students do better when they feel like they’re entering a community,” said Cindy White, the associate dean of Undergraduate Curriculum and Programs who greeted students at the event. “CMCI Connect makes visible that we’re here because we need to know each other to be able to do this work.”

Student recruitment and outreach manager Shelby Javernick, who developed the event, said she hoped it would help students to start thinking of themselves as part of CMCI, and about what skills and values they can bring to the college.

Throughout the day, students participated in team building activities facilitated by fellow student team leaders. In the afternoon, CMCI professors arrived to meet students and judge activities. Rick Stevens, an associate professor of media studies, is excited to see how the new class progresses, and hoped the event "gave students an idea of what being a CMCI major would look like," he said.

This year’s freshman class will be the largest ever at CMCI, with 370 incoming students from 34 different states and six different countries. "This represents a 30 percent increase in class size," Javernick said.

At CMCI Connect, participation nearly doubled that of last year with students from each major present.

“I wouldn’t have known that there were so many different people within CMCI,” said Maddie Eye, a freshman Communication major. “I thought all of them would be people who wanted to be on stage like me, but a lot of them are very behind the scenes, too.”