In a special offer, Rutgers will pay transportation costs for groups of Lakewood students who want to visit the university next year
McCormick and 39 new faculty and administrators from campuses in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden were visiting the school May 23 as part of Rutgers’ annual New Faculty Traveling Seminar.
McCormick’s offer came after some Lakewood students and guidance counselors said they didn’t know as much about Rutgers as they thought they should, and visits to the campus might help. They said, however, their district lacked the resources to pay the transportation costs. “I will work with Dr. Clauser to arrange a series of bus trips to Rutgers for you next year,” McCormick said. “I will work personally with you to get those buses on the road.”
McCormick said the bus trips would not be intended to convince students to come to Rutgers. “The idea is not to get people to come to Rutgers, although they would receive a high quality education at our university, but to offer the students a taste of the myriad of possibilities available to them in college and beyond.”
“So much of life is luck,” Clauser said. “Three months ago, I got a phone call asking if we would host a group of new Rutgers faculty in May. What did we have to lose? Nothing. What did we have to gain? Bus trips!”
For four years, the weeklong seminar has taken new Rutgers faculty and administrators around the state by bus, exposing them to the places, people, and issues of New Jersey.
Before reaching Lakewood, this year’s tour visited the state house in Trenton, a koi farm in Carney’s Point, a Japanese-American community and Buddhist temple in Cumberland County, and a cranberry bog in Burlington County. Thursday, faculty visited chemical and pharmaceutical companies in Monmouth and Union counties and held a discussion about immigration in Morristown. On Friday, May 25, they completed their journey on Ellis Island.