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What an amazing performance from the Spelman College Glee Club, they always know how to get the party started. It would not be an official Omen event without an opening number from them. Hello, and Happy Sunday to all of you. Welcome everyone to this year, spellbound and a huge shout out to the class of 2025 and all of your families. Congratulations on your acceptance to the number one HBCU in the nation. This year, the admissions office hit a record of receiving over that 11,000 applications. So to be a part of the few that were selected for that mission is a huge accomplishment. Go ahead and pat yourselves on the back. And with that being said the work has only just begun anywho We are so excited to have you here with us for the next few days. As you make one of the biggest decisions in your life. Drop in the chat where y'all are from Let me see all those states that you guys are from New Jersey, Connecticut. Oh, Chicago, Billy. Okay. Georgia Hey, Georgia. Maryland, Marilyn, Miami, Houston, Detroit. Okay, guys, I see y'all. Some of you have already met me on social media but my name is Sidney and I'm a junior psychology major on the pre med track with a minor in comparative Women's Studies in Chicago, Illinois. Whoa, girl, that was a mouthful. I remember being in your shoes super excited to get a taste of what something was really like. Every year the Office of Admissions and the Spelman College community excitedly anticipate this very moment when we can join together to celebrate and welcome the incoming class. Most students at Spelman will tell you that spellbound is what confirmed their decision to attend Spelman, even though they had several other suitable options for their interests. As you all might have guessed, Spellman is spell bound is an event exclusively designed to serve as a spelled special introduction for new admitted students and their families. From countless hours of studying and putting your best foot forward and academic pursuits. To the days and nights you spent envisioning and discussing your personal college journey with your loved ones and friends. All of your hard work has led you to this very moment, which is your story, class of 2025. This is your time your very own spellbound, spellbound 2021. I am so delighted and honored to be a part of this event that will show you how amazing Spelman colleges this year spellbound theme is spelled out the Odyssey volume 140. at Spelman, you will learn to embrace your journey and power your voice and excel beyond the gates. I hope this short journey for you will show you that. Throughout the next three days, I will take you along a voyage as we embark upon where you are now and the growth that is yet to come. That's right, you guessed it, we are loving on each other as we navigate through these extraordinary times. Learning to lean on the community that surrounds you is important to your success. Although you create your own path and have siblings serving, having siblings along the way to support you is always helpful. You all are some of the best and brightest women that are determined to reach for the stars and achieve your goals. Before we get into the fun, here's a little history about Spelman College. Spelman College was founded April 11 1881 by Sophia B Packard and Harriet e Giles. Spelman is an all women's liberal arts private HBCU. With a population of about 2100 students. Diversity is prominent with our students being from over 42 different states in 18 different countries. being located in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia opens the door opens a door for several opportunities for hands on experiences. With 34 majors and minors offered at Spelman, you can pursue a career in almost anything, but I will not bore you too much with the history. However, be sure to continue paying attention to the quick facts that I mentioned about myself and Spelman throughout the program as there are been there will be many opportunities to win some goodies. As you can probably tell, I'm so excited. So I'm gonna stop talking. And I love I look forward to welcoming you and engaging you throughout the next three days. I am going to pass the mic to our interim director of admissions Miss Chelsea Holly to kick us off. See you all later.
Thank you so much, Sydney for that spirited welcome.
Good afternoon. My
name is Chelsea Holly and I serve as the interim director of admissions. Welcome to spell down the Odyssey. On behalf of the Office of Admissions the division of enrollment management in the entire Spelman community. Congratulations on your acceptance to the 100 and 40th class of Spelman College. Each year, the Office of Admissions puts our heads together to plan a program that captures the essence of the entering class. For the graduating class of 2021. There was no shortage of trials discomfort and uncertainty. Hence, thought unsee. Through your meticulously prepared applications, you took us on a journey through your transition to virtual learning, the drastic changes to your social and home life, and the continuous longing for things to just go back to normal. But weave into those stories were tales of overcoming obstacles, being tenacious at every turn, and becoming a change agent in your communities in schools. We read along as you voted for the first time and made history electing our vice president. As we reviewed your resumes we learned about the nonprofit's you founded and the e commerce businesses that you launched during the pandemic. Your wife's film and essays vividly described how Spelman chose you long before your blue envelope. You took care of your siblings, you became essential workers, you interned at local hospitals, commissioned your artwork and produce your own documentaries. Class of 2025 the Office of Admissions is so confident in your ability to uphold excellence. This year we received over 11,000 applications. Your offer of admission means that the committee found you best suited to continue the Spellman legacy. You should be incredibly proud. You average the 3.8 GPA a 1200 essay t score, a rigorous curriculum and significant leadership and civic involvement. You are a diverse group in many ways. Our admitted students represent 46 states in 25 countries, with our top domestic regions being Georgia, DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York and California. Our top international territories are the Cindy's West Africa in the UK. We cannot wait to welcome you to the city of Atlanta. Over the next three days, we will foreshadow your Spelman journey. Much like your high school career, we know the journey to becoming a Spelman woman will not be easy. Welcome to Chapter One of the Odyssey embrace. Today you will have an opportunity to socialize with your new siblings and have a candid conversation with our dean of students about campus life, wellness and going to college in the AUC. Tomorrow's programming is meant to leave you feeling empowered and ready to change the world. We will be answering all your questions on next steps so that you can feel confident as we look towards the fall semester. And finally we will install them with chapter three Excel. We are looking beyond rates and chatting with alumni about the value of their Spelman experience and how to carve your own pathway after Spelman, class of 2025 students, parents and loved ones. It is my hope that over the course of this program, you will feel closer to the Spelman community more informed about navigating these next steps and excited to begin your journey. Congratulations again, welcome to Spelman College. Now it is my pleasure to introduce our next guest, the 10th president of Spelman College. Before coming to Spelman, she served as the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU for over two decades. She began her professional career at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2009. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to be vice chair of the President's Committee of the arts and humanities, a product of a liberal arts institution herself. She holds a BA in English from Swarthmore, and a Master's and PhD from Syracuse University. During her Spelman tenure, she launched imagine, invent, ascend, a strategic vision for the college that builds on celmins legacy to educate black women for the 21st century. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming the 10th president of Spelman College, Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell.
Thank you so much, Chelsea. Hello, how's everybody doing today? Please enter it into the chat and let me know how you're doing. It is such a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. The image behind me is the image of sister's chapel, the spiritual heart of Spelman College. And if we were doing this program in person, we'd all be gathered in sisters chapel, but in person, or virtually, we are so pleased to be with you this afternoon. I'm going to take a look at the chat and see how everybody is doing. Let's see what you had to say. Oh, hey, doing well. Amazing. Great. Fine, how are you? I'm great to grateful. Oh, wonderful. So we have a nice, warm, spirited audience out there. It's really good to be with you. Now the first order of business is I want everybody who received that blue envelope to stand up in your home and give yourself a big round of applause. We are so proud of you and proud of your accomplishments. Congratulations. Now I know you didn't make this journey by yourself. I'm sure there were parents, friends, mentors, coaches, who helped you along the way. So I want you to turn to them if they're here with you today, and give them a big round of applause. And thank them for all of their wisdom, their guidance, their counsel and their love. Now all of you have a big decision to make. And I'll bet that many of you were accepted into a lot of other very good colleges and universities. Show me in the chat some of the other colleges and universities that you've been accepted to. I know you must have been because you have such Sterling backgrounds and Sterling profiles. You really are an incredibly impressive group. Yep, just as I thought, Princeton, Hampton Harvard, everybody hear what I'm saying with that is that you can pretty much go anywhere you choose to go. And so the question for you is, where do I want to spend my next four years? My next four years coming of age as a black woman in America? Where do I want to spend that time? And how do I make that choice? Now, Spelman College is an excellent school. It is an elite school. And by that I mean, we have high performing faculty, we have outstanding students, we have high expectations, we demand a lot. But that's true for many other colleges that you're listening in this chat. So the question is, why would you choose Spelman College? And how would you make that choice? If I was sitting in your shoes, I would think of five things that would guide me in making the choice. I would ask myself, what are the values of this school? Second, I would ask, who were my peers be? I would ask, Who will be my mentors, my teachers, my coaches, I would ask myself, what are the school's values and how those values live inside of the school's culture, how they manifest themselves? And what will I take with me when I graduate when I leave this school? So let's start with Spelman College's values. As you all know, our mission is that we are a school that educates black women to become global leaders in their field. And to do that, we feel that we have to create a place that allows you to bring your whole self to your education. Bring yourself as a woman, as a black person, as a mathematician, as a poet, as a musician, as an entrepreneur, as whatever those multiple identities are, we want all of that to come into that space. And we want the four years here to be the place where you can assemble all of those identities creatively and powerfully to be the you that you need to become
an even as we encourage you to become the whole your whole self. We recognize that education is not only a personal commodity, we believe that education is a public good. So even as we are valuing, educating the whole self we're also value valuing education for the whole community. That's what we value at Spelman College. So now who will be your peers? Well take a look at this chat and see, look at the different places where your fellow admitted students have also been admitted. Chelsea, spoke about the average GPA 3.8 the average sh t 1200. You come from 25 different countries, 46 different states. You are accomplished musicians who are already receiving conditions. You have become a finalist for your state's competition state history competition. You're an entrepreneur who's raised money to build a school in a rural town in Ethiopia. You've been elected to your school board boards, diversity and inclusion Task Force. You have agency, you're making your own opportunities. You are You are proactive. And you will be joining hundreds of black women who are just like you. When you sit in your classes at Spelman and you look around, you will see women who are ambitious for themselves, but they're also ambitious for each other. And they will be your Spelman sisters. And you'll find a lonely when you come here. This is a school who graduates women who become Roz Brewer, who's now the CEO of Walgreens boots Alliance are one of the most powerful women in corporate black women in corporate America. When you come to Spelman, they'll be visitors like our alumnus Alice Walker, or the novelist tiare Jones or the playwright Baroque night. They are frequent visitors here. Just last week, I had a courageous conversation with Stacey Abrams, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She He is a frequent presence at Spelman College. And that is true for many so many of our remarkable alumni. And they too, are your Spelman sisters.
So the third question you want to ask yourself, who's going to be in the classroom teaching? Who's going to be my advisor, my mentor, my coach, and helped me make sure I'm making the right choices. As I go through my journey here at Spelman College. I just had the pleasure of spending the afternoon looking at what we call tenure and promotion dockets. Those are the dockets that are prepared for our faculty who are appealing for permanent citizenship at Spelman. And I'd tell you, it was thrilling to read those dockets because they are leading researchers in environmental studies, in chemistry, in psychology, in English literature, they're looking at 19th century romanticism and asking the question, Where are the black authors whose narratives were emerging during this period? They're asking the question about water management in urban areas, and using their research tools to examine the important questions that we need to ask ourselves in our community, you'll find that they are there to help you enter into research labs, like the Broad Institute for biomedical research at MIT and harden, or the Perelman medical school at U pin, or get you into an internship at Sotheby's or at the Getty Research Institute. All of these places are places with whom we have partnerships and many, many more, they will guide you into the internships that are going to help you prepare for whatever profession you're entering. And they will help you identify the research opportunities that will allow you to take what you have learned in the classroom, and solve real world problems. You'll find that from the day you entered campus, you have someone there who will help you and guide you to make those choices. And you'll find that community service is a requirement for every single person who's at Spelman College. And that service can be anything from having a reading circle at Wentworth prison for women, or it can be teaching literacy in our local public schools. right nearby. You'll find also the chair of the college that values graduate education we value it so much that the National Science Foundation has determined that Spelman College produces more black women who complete PhDs in STEM fields than any other college or university in the country. You will find that Spelman College is so devoted to study abroad and to the understanding of new cultures and opening yourself up to the world that Spelman College sends more black students abroad than any other college or university in the country. And we study we send them abroad not just as not as a tourist, but to do environmental research can afford to have a residency in neuroscience in London, to study the Japanese language in Tokyo.
Now, the fourth question you want to ask is, what's it like to be here Justin II on campus, walking around the campus inside of the culture of the Spelman sisterhood? Well, I will tell you something. It was a challenge to recreate that feeling of sisterhood during this pandemic. But our Spelman students prevail. We had our upper class students who adopted first year students and we're available to even virtually to tutor them, to counsel them, and to help them navigate a difficult opening semester. We saw our upper class students who hosted study sessions for their sisters. We saw it with our students who organize local meetups in their hometowns for Spelman students so we could hold on to some of that sense of community. While we were all working remotely last semester, we saw this sisterhood emerge with our community, the lumbee, who raised hundreds of 1000s of dollars to buy laptops, tablets, hotspots and other computer equipment for our students who didn't have it. So they could have that the resources to have do their studies. The note We witnessed a Spelman culture that found new ways to reinvent our most cherished customs and ceremonies that enabled us to celebrate the 140 year legacy of black girl excellence. That is Spelman history. And finally, you'll ask yourself, what will I take with me when it when those graduating seniors walk and they're going to have an in person ceremony this year, when they walk this year? What will they take with them when they leave? Spelman College? Well, I will tell you what they'll take unshakeable sense of themselves, they will have a sense of their history, their identity, and their connection to Spelman sisterhood that no one can challenge or undermine for the rest of their lives. So one thing you can be sure, whatever college you choose, know that this is a great time to be black, and to be a woman. And it's a great time to be black and a woman at Spelman College. Black women are ascending globally into leadership roles all over the world unthinkable 10 years ago. So if you want to come of age as a black woman, in a place made for you, with the highest expectations for you, demanding the best from you, a place that loves you for who you are, and intends to send you out into the world to soar then Spelman College is the place for you. Thank you so much for spending the next three days with us. Be well beetelite Thank you for faith. Thank you
