Jessica Taylor, ’09 polymer and fiber engineering, loves her new office. It’s beautiful. It’s spacious. And not only has it made her job as director of Recruiting and Scholarships for the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering easier, in a certain sense it’s practically doing it for her.
“This building just makes you want to come back for more,” Taylor said. “When prospective students come and visit the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center with their parents, they get to see a whole building dedicated to their student’s success here at Auburn University. When families get to see the investment that the college is making in their students’ futures, that makes a difference.”
Over the past year, in their old location in Shelby Center, Taylor’s team, which includes Jenny Sconyers, Sydney Riley and Avalon Meacham, has facilitated engineering campus tours for nearly 5,500 prospective students and guests — a 63 percent increase in just over five years. Add to that number several thousand people who have taken advantage of the office’s popular daily information sessions and group visits in the same time frame, and it’s easy to see why Taylor deems the additional space and functionality afforded by the $44 million showpiece so invaluable.
“It has just really allowed us to scale up our activities and offerings,” she said. “We always try our best to provide that excellent customer service, and we get to do that in this state-of-the-art facility.”
Taylor said the new space will also revolutionize the outreach programs key to developing what she calls “the pipeline for future Auburn engineers.”
“We start with K-12 outreach to expose students to the field of engineering with hands-on demonstrations, summer camps, robotics competition, after-school programs in addition to many other programs. When these students start hitting that college selection process in high school, that’s when we really start recruiting them hard,” Taylor said. “We use outreach and scholarships so that we can shape each class into a really great group of incoming students every year.”
According to the surveys, it’s working.
“Before each visit, we ask prospective students to rate their opinion of Auburn Engineering in relation to other schools they’re considering,” Taylor said. “72.4 percent say that Auburn is their first choice, or among their top choices. But after they visit, that goes up to 92.9 percent.”
Those are great numbers, obviously. But once she’s able to factor in the “Brown-Kopel effect,” Taylor expects them to be even greater.
“It’s a really exciting time to be at Auburn,” Taylor said. “What we are now able to do because of the investment our donors have made and continue to make in our current and future engineering students’ lives is amazing.”
