Hello and welcome to Illinois Wesleyan University.

Hi, and hello to you and thanks for joining us. I'm Jessica. What better place to kick off our campus tours than the Illinois Wesleyan Welcome Center. When you visit campus, this is your first stop and there are plenty of helpful people here to guide you in the right direction. So where should we start? Illinois Wesleyan University is located in the medium-sized twin cities of Bloomington and Normal, Illinois. A little over two hours south of Chicago, north of St. Louis, and 2.5 hours west of Indianapolis. IWU's 80 acre campus is in the heart of the Bloomington district. Less than a mile north of downtown and a mile south of Normal and Illinois State University. Wesleyan has a mixture of modern and historic classroom buildings, research labs, the new Aims Library, shirt athletic center and a classic main quadrangle.

[ Music ] I'm getting better here, come on. Maybe I could just, maybe I could join the team. So students come out here to the quad and play when they have free time?

Yeah, you'll see students out here playing different things, or over at the surface center a lot.

[ Laughter ] And Windsor, and a lot, but when it gets nice out all the students are out here playing ultimate Frisbee or.

That's cool.

Playing on the ropes.

There are approximately 2100 undergrads between the College of Liberal Arts, College of Fine Arts, and School of Nursing. 56 percent are female, 44 percent male, 13 percent minority, and four percent international students. The [inaudible] percent of students admitted into Illinois Wesleyan have an ACT between 26 and 30, an SAT critical reading and math score of 1260, and an average GPA of 3.7 on a four-point scale. Annual tuition and fees are around 32,000 dollars. And if you decide to live on campus, room and board is roughly 8,000 dollars for a total of about 40,000 dollars a year. 90 percent of Wesleyan students qualify for some type of financial aid. So the cost is generally much less. IWU offers 42 majors plus eight pre-professional programs. A few favorites among students are business, biology, English, psychology, music, theater arts, and nursing.

The sciences are phenomenally strong here. We have about anywhere from about 22 to 24 percent of our students majoring in some area of the natural sciences and our placement rates into professional school for medical school, dental school, and so on is extremely high and at some of the best rates in the country.

If you're ready to launch a career in the medical field, Illinois Wesleyan is the place to be. 90 percent of IWU students are admitted into medical school each year. That's 40 percent more than the national average. There are 184 teaching faculty, 70 percent are tenured and 93 percent hold a PhD or the highest degree in their field.

I think what brings students to Illinois Wesleyan is the chance to get a real connection with the faculty member. So I'm into my courses, but I also run a research lab. I'm active in my research. And so I have students who work with me and help me conduct my research.

We really try to provide opportunities for students to work on original research at the undergraduate level. And that's something that you can imagine is really interesting and fulfilling for students. But it's also interesting for us, the faculty.

They're always available you can make appointments with them anytime or just stop by and see them and they'll talk to you anytime about anything.

Students have access to me. They don't have to find a grad student. So everything that I would ask a graduate student to do, or I'm at an institution that I had grad students, I'm asking my undergrad students to do.

The IWU Titans compete at the NCAA Division Three level. More than 100 Titan teams have won conference championships, and Wesleyan ranks in the top 10 nationally for academic, all Americans alongside Norte Dame and Stanford. Time for today's history lesson. This is Wilder Field where the Titan football team competes. And it's the fifth oldest field in NCAA history.

[ Music ] There are 12 university housing options, including nine traditional residences halls. This is a suite in a Harriett Fuller Rust house. Pretty nice.

[ Music ] Or live the life of luxury in this mansion turned residence hall. I think I just found my home away from home.

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One memory I have is the night before finals, this might not have been the best choice, but we were up until about five in the morning having a shaving cream fight between the two different buildings, which was a lot of fun.

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Students can choose from nearly 200 clubs and organizations, including six fraternities and six sororities.

The first orientation week for freshman is really fun. There's always stuff planned and like activities, and stuff to do as a group. And they really make you feel welcome here for the first week, and you really get acclimated to everything.

Here's something you won't find at every school, a four, four, one calendar. For the whole [inaudible] term students can focus on one academic course. They can do an internship, take a class on campus, study abroad, or even do research.

They could go just about anywhere. So they've been in Atlanta, Georgia with CNN. They've been to New York and MTV and Good Morning America.

We have two Illinois Wesleyan study abroad programs, one in London, one in Madrid. And students have been asking over time about opportunities to pursue their substantive interests while they're in London or Madrid. And so we've been working with partners in both of those cities to try to place students. If they're interested in environment policy we've linked up students with members of Parliament or with non-profit organizations.

If you've got some free time, head over to Franklin Park. It's right across the street from campus. You can come here to hang out with friends, study, or hit the swings. For YouniversityTV, I'm Jessica. We're outta here.

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