EMU Faculty Ambassadors

By: Mary-Elizabeth Murphy

Gabby is one of the EMU undergraduate students I mentor.  In the two years I have known her, she has added a second major, joined the EMU Honors College, become a McNair Fellow, traveled to California and Florida for research, presented at the Undergraduate Symposium, and now plans to apply to doctoral programs in Clinical Psychology.  Gabby is a confident, poised, and ambitious student eager to take on the world.  Gabby’s success can be measured in equal parts: her own talents, the faculty who have nurtured her, and the incredible opportunities EMU provides.  

At an enormous university, Gabby might be a number, but here at EMU, she is our student with talents we celebrate and aspirations we cultivate.  EMU offers a distinctive alchemy of opportunity, academic rigor, and attention for our students, positioning them on a well-lit pathway of career success, lifelong curiosity, and even a desire to pay it forward.  There’s a kind of magic in an EMU education.

In the past year, the Michigan legislature passed a law creating free community college for recent high-school graduates.  While a life-changing opportunity for students in the state, this legislation poses challenges to EMU’s quest to attract students like Gabby.  Faculty and administrators in the College of Arts & Sciences and I worked to ensure that departments in our college were transfer friendly, whether it was updating websites, assessing courses, or polishing pathway programs.

But we also recognized that the best way to sell EMU to community college transfer students was for EMU faculty to be the storytellers, narrating in vivid detail our own students’ journeys.  All of us can remember coaching our first Undergraduate Symposium Student, recruiting a student in our gen-ed class to a major, or witnessing a student confidently take command of difficult material. Telling these stories might resonate with potential students.

By Fall 2025, we launched the CAS Ambassadors program.  I was so heartened when thirty-five faculty and lecturers in CAS eagerly signed up as volunteers.  In Fall 2025-Winter 2026, these CAS Ambassadors drove many miles across Michigan on twenty-five visits to community colleges, as well as to Sienna Heights.  

Here, these Ambassadors were able to connect with prospective students, interact with community faculty and administrators, and, most importantly, demonstrate that at EMU, it is faculty members and lecturers who are laser-focused on undergraduate students. Community college administrators told EMU Admissions how impressed they were that our faculty members engaged so directly with prospective students.  

I was equally privileged to help plan last year’s CONNECT Teaching & Learning Conference with community college faculty, in conjunction with the Faculty Development Center.  It was thrilling to see seventy community college faculty members stream into the Student Center on Friday, February 13 and spend the day in conversation with EMU faculty about pedagogy, student support services, and the mentoring work we all undertake.

This year, we are broadening the program to “EMU Faculty Ambassadors.”  Building on the success of our CAS experiment, we aim to recruit fifty faculty members from across EMU to take the lead in academic student recruitment: visiting community colleges and high school fairs, emailing with admitted students in our disciplines, writing postcards, and forging connections with community college faculty (some of whom are our own alums!).  

The Faculty Ambassadors program is a remarkable service opportunity because it allows us to connect our enthusiasm and passion about the transformative student experience at EMU with a bigger audience. It even gives us the chance to learn about programs at EMU in other colleges and schools, which only makes us better university citizens.  Since we interact with students everyday in the classroom, we are uniquely suited to transmit this excitement to our future students on recruitment trips.

If you would like to consider serving as an EMU Faculty Ambassador, you can fill out this form here.  There will be a training on Friday, September 11 at noon in Strong 201 with lunch!  We will record the training for those unable to attend.  Once everyone is trained, we will gather our student success stories and hit the road to recruit a future class of EMU Eagles. We hope you;ll hit that road with us!