or Inquiring Minds:

Marie Tudor

For those curious, or maybe just those who are new to things at MBU specifically, here’s a little information on a person of interest. Wondering why another college has yet to be included? Don’t worry, I’ll get to some others soon. As for now, this piece is for the inquiring minds interested in Marie Tudor.

Currently, MBU's Director of First-Year Experience is a wonderful woman who goes by the name of Marie Tudor. An alumni of MBU herself, Miss Tudor is an avid supporter of the college and has worked multiple different positions since her graduation in 2005, but her favorite to date (or so she has told me) is her current job. I was privileged to be able to interview Marie Tudor and ask her a few questions so students could get to know her better. She has no plans to leave, but instead she has told me she is ready and willing to go wherever she feels God wants her and is hoping for missionary work at some point.

Starting with the formalities, Marie Tudor has worked full time at Missouri Baptist University for 10 years or so, and her job is to work with 1st time students and orient them to college life through her collegiate seminar class and outside help, all in the hopes that her freshmen have an easier time acclimating to college. Most of her time is spent trying to understand her driving question for each student: "What don't you know that you don't know?" Once she gets that figured out, it gets so much easier, but that in itself is quite the task.

Now that that's out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. With all the work she does, Ms. Tudor told me in-depth of her specific love for Welcome Weekend each year because there she gets to learn all about her new students. She spends the time talking to them about hopes, dreams, goals and stories that they may have and tries to share some herself. She even shared her thoughts on this year's crop of kids. To her, the new batch seems to be mostly good kids, and they are coming with a few new programs that were led by the incoming freshmen, and she hopes for more of this work ethic in future years.

Ms. Tudor is an avid fan of owls (her desk had quite a few and they were awesome), while also having more bold colors in her place of work than anyone I'd ever seen. It was fun to just be in her office, and she certainly seemed to realize that and played towards the fun. While I was there, she told me about her job and how she had once bribed twins with free dinner early on in her career when she couldn't figure out how to stop them from getting in trouble. That went on every week for over a semester until they left, and now one is a policeman and the other moved away, both making much better choices now than they used to.

Unfortunately, Miss Tudor has told me she no longer bribes people with food, so if this made you want to try and get that sweet deal, it is no longer available, but other help is always there and she couldn't stress enough how much she just wished that freshmen would stop shying away from it like it was a bad thing to come to school and have to put effort into learning. "After all," she told me, "you chose this." She told me all about how some people just need to hit that moment of realization that this is what they chose to pursue, paid for, and is there first chance to properly begin adulting (a word she is quite fond of). Miss Tudor makes it her job to get people to that point, and it makes everything worth it, she had reminisced as we talked, when a student that had been struggling just gets it.

As one last piece of advice, she wanted me to make sure to stress this point for any incoming freshman who may read this, and it certainly is a good tip for anyone confused in college:

ASK QUESTIONS!

Check out next week's article of For Inquiring Minds when my interview with Dr. Andy Chambers (the Senior Vice President for Student Development; Professor of Bible for MBU) goes up on 9/19.