Creating a Warm Taylor Welcome

Purple and white signs reading "Welcome Home." The President’s tunnel filled with students, faculty, and staff cheering and waving. A helping hand to carry boxes into the space that will become home for the next four years. These are just glimpses of what new students experience on their first day at Taylor University.

This past weekend, a record enrollment of 730 new students, including 681 freshmen and 49 transfer students, experienced Welcome Weekend firsthand.

Welcome Weekend is a chance for the Taylor community to demonstrate their heart of hospitality, and it isn’t just the result of spontaneous energy. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of new students, a peek behind the scenes reveals hundreds of student leaders preparing to serve.

Emilie Hoffman, Coordinator of New Student Orientation and head of Welcome Weekend, has been deep in planning for weeks. Her office is filled with boxes of t-shirts and lanyards, but she said the nitty-gritty details of scheduling, designing, and training really come to life when the student leaders come back to campus. "Am I passionate about lanyards? Probably not. But I can’t wait until my cabinet is here because the students bring so much energy, and that makes it all worth it."

Describing the sweetness of watching new students develop into leaders, Hoffman reflected, "There’s a beautiful rhythm we see year after year. At least half of my student leaders were freshmen a year ago. So, to have them in a room for leadership training and remind them that last year, this room was praying for them always gets me excited."

Our many sophomores serving in leadership speak to Taylor’s culture of encouragement that empowers every student to use their gifts as servant-leaders.

Students Prepare the Way

This August, over 550 servant-leaders came to campus early to prepare for the new students’ arrival. These leaders served in many different areas, including media services, Life Together groups (previously known as Precept groups), International Orientation, and residence halls. It is their passion for Taylor and for incoming students that makes Welcome Weekend so special.

In fact, many students are so passionate that they’ll serve in leadership more than once. Kathryn Monsma, a Global Studies and History double major, served as a Personnel Assistant (similar to an RA) on the third floor of Gerig Hall (3G) during her sophomore year. Now, she’s returning to the residence hall as a senior to serve as 3G’s Discipleship Assistant, a role that is responsible for cultivating spiritual life on the floor or wing.

"Coming to campus early is a lot of fun!" said Monsma. "It’s an honor to be there with good peers and friends who all have the same desire: to prepare Taylor well for those to come. A lot goes into that preparation—training, leadership lectures, team bonding time, decorating the dorms, planning Welcome Weekend traditions, and a lot of prayer. Some of the sweetest moments are going room to room and praying for each resident by name."

This is a lived-out example of a cherished belief at Taylor: you belong before you arrive. Monsma said that if there’s one thing she would want new students to know, it would be "that their leadership teams—from dorm leadership to your orientation groups to Taylor faculty and staff—love them and have been praying for them."

Welcome Home, Trojans

The residence halls may be bare when student leaders arrive, but they don’t stay that way for long. Each year, the student leadership teams for each wing and floor prayerfully collaborate on a spiritual theme and spend days decorating the common spaces to match.

"Why do student leaders care so much about what the hall looks like?" asked Hoffman, "Because they want it to feel like home."