Beca Livermont drove herself across the state in a tough rainstorm to make it to move-in day at the University of Minnesota Duluth. After she arrived safely, she joked that her choice of a school was "meant to be."
She is one of about 2,000 first-year and transfer students who moved into their dorm rooms on Tuesday with the help of teams that made piles of clothes, bedding and furniture disappear from the lawn in minutes.
Livermont, of Fargo, N.D., had been set on attending school in Flagstaff, Ariz., for a couple years. Then she started having doubts last summer about living that far from her "tight-knit" family.
Around the same time, she first visited Duluth on a family vacation. The following fall, she toured the campus and sealed the deal.
"It feels like you're in a city when you're in town, and then you can just drive up the North Shore just a little bit, and you're in the middle of the wilderness, and I think that's awesome," Livermont said.
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She plans to study English education while minoring in deaf studies and theater, all in hopes of becoming a high school English teacher. The American Sign Language class offering caught her attention, a program she said was hard to find.
She's part of the 14 percent of UMD students from outside Minnesota. Her mother, Christa Livermont, said it's not entirely exciting moving her youngest almost five hours away from home.
"I'll get in touch with that emotion after we say goodbye," she said.
Not all parents fretted saying goodbye to their kids come move-in day. Jill Yeager helped move in her daughter Kristin and said she wasn't nervous about sending her youngest child off to college, knowing her daughter will make her own path.
"She's going to get involved, and she's going to take charge. She's got to have her social life in the middle of all kinds of stuff," Yeager, of Wayzata, Minn., said. "I'm not worried about her at all."
In the time it took Yeager to talk about the move, a crew already had delivered all of Kristin's things to her dorm room.
"Oh my God, look at that, how awesome is that!" Yeager said, turning around to see it all gone.
Close to 200 students helped with the move-in Tuesday, including residence assistants; RockStars, who volunteer to welcome new Bulldogs during Welcome Week; and Curb Crew, a variety of club leaders, LLC members and other students who volunteer to help families unload into the residence halls.
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A new initiative this year is the BizDogs Living Learning Community for first-year students within the Labovitz School of Business and Economics, said Mary Keenan, assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs. It allows the pre-business students to live on the same floor, while also taking some of the same courses and participating in the tailored activities provided.
The 80 pre-business students who opted to live in the LLC moved in Monday. Honors students had already shared living spaces on campus, said Jeremy Leiferman, director of housing and residence life, but it wasn't specific to students' majors.
"There's research that has been done that students living together who are sharing a major and academic studies do better academically," Leiferman said.
Fall semester classes begin on Monday. Keenan estimates total enrollment will be about 11,200 students, up from last year's 11,018. The first-year enrollment is also up more than five percent, with 2,250 first-year students to begin on Monday.
