Juniata College (Pennsylvania) welcomes students from Sri Lanka

Juniata Co l l e g e (Pennsylvania) was pleased to welcome Scholarships for USA on its campus recently, with hopes of establishing a long-term partnership. Juniata will work with Scholarships for USA to recruit the best and brightest students from Sri Lanka through an established $ 30,000 per year academic scholarship. Juniata College offers students a mix of academic flexibility, small classes, and programs in the natural sciences that are nationally recognised for excellence. Juniata students create their own majors, conduct research alongside faculty, and more than 40% take part in study abroad opportunities around the world. Juniata is recognised by every major media rankings polls among liberal arts colleges.

For instance, US News & World Report 2016 Rankings named Juniata an ‘A+ School for B Students’ among national liberal arts colleges. In the overall US News & World Report Rankings, Juniata maintained its 105th ranking in the Top Liberal Arts Colleges in the magazine’s annual poll. In other polls, Juniata was ranked at No. 179 in Forbes.com’s America’s Best Colleges, one of 650 colleges and universities nationwide to be rated. There are more than 1,500 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. In addition, Juniata rose to 89th in Washington Monthly’s larger Best Liberal Arts Colleges poll.

Juniata also remains one of just 40 colleges featured in the college guidebook ‘Colleges That Change Lives’, by a former New York Times education editor, the late Loren Pope. The new edition is by Hilary Masel l Oswald. Finally, Juniata was chosen as one of the nation’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to the Princeton Review. “One little group of upper-class students felt so strongly about the quality of their Juniata experiences that they asked me, ‘What’s the difference between Juniata and Amherst?’ My answer was that Amherst has more very bright, more sophisticated, and more well-to-do freshmen than Juniata, but by the time they’re seniors the situation has been reversed.

The Juniata seniors’ talents have been doubled and sharpened, and they have been better equipped to cope, to adapt, and to take risks — things they will have to do in this new world.” – Colleges That Change Lives Juniata College’s 110- acre campus features a central quad of featuring the colleges library, science centre, performing arts facility and administrative/ classroom building. The College offers more than 20 on campus residence halls or student houses. In 2014, Juniata dedicated its first single-room residence hall featuring including geothermal heating, energy-efficient lighting, plantings and green spaces, and a bike shelter to encourage less driving. Instead of majors, Juniata offers what it calls a Program of Emphasis (POEs ) . Approximately one-third of the students design their own academic program. Each student also works with two faculty advisers to ensure they have created an interdisciplinary, well-rounded academic program that reflects the liberal arts. Students may also choose a course of study from more than 50 existing POEs.

The most popular are biology, accounting, business and economics, environmental studies, education, and psychology. The college also offers such unique programs as Peace and Conflict Studies, one of the oldest and most comprehensive programs in higher education. The museum studies POE teaches students how to curate art (and provides internships at prestigious galleries around the nation), while the Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership provides $ 15,000 in seed capital for budding business leaders. T h e R a y s t o w n Environmental Studies Field Station, located on nearby Raystown Lake, provides students an opportunity to study biology ‘amid biology’ as they can spend an entire semester living in student lodges by the lake.

The von Liebig Centre for Science provides opportunities for student/ faculty research surpassing those available at even large universities. Classes are small, save for a few science-related introductory courses. Many have fewer than 20 students, which provides ample interaction between professors and students. Juniata also has international exchange/study abroad agreements with colleges and universities in 16 countries. About 47 percent of students participate in undergraduate research projects.

The college is located in Huntingdon, Pa. (population 9,000), which offers a wide array of diversions for college students, including several restaurants and a movie theatre. Community service is popular, as are road trips to Penn State (40 minutes away), Baltimore, Phi l ade l phi a , and Pittsburgh. Moving forward , Juniata College is interested in developing further partnerships and exchanges with Sri Lankan students, counsellors, and universities. Juniata is dedicated to continuing the internationalisation of its campus and believes that Sri Lanka is the entryway to doing so. For more information about Juniata, please visit www.juniata. edu. Any interested students should forward resumes and schedule an interview with www. scholarshipsforusa.com.