Montana Education Excellence

“We are trying to figure out what we need to offer down here,” Clark said. “And so we’ll be going out into the community and listening … and we think it’s a really positive thing that the community is going to come out and tell us what they want.”

High school seniors who plan to attend Montana State University in the fall of 2010 are encouraged to apply as soon as possible for scholarships through the new MSU Premier Scholarship Program.

MSU Friday is a free event open to all high school juniors and seniors and their families.

“It’s the greatest show on earth,” Smith said. “No, really, it’s a big deal. When else do you get students from 250 to 300 colleges and universities on your campus?”

The Office for Student Success is not so much a new UM entity as it is a combination of existing university services meant to increase student retention rates, said Associate Provost Arlene Walker-Andrews.

This year, for the first time in Montana, instruction in Mandarin Chinese has been introduced into our state’s public schools. Because there are no certified teachers of Chinese in Montana, the instruction is being provided from the Confucius Institute in the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana by two young teachers from China.

Sean Sullivan, a 1993 UM journalism graduate, is director of consumer sales and marketing for Questia, which offers 76,000 textbooks and 2.7 million journals, magazines and newspaper articles online.

Boyle called Great Falls High "just a great school" that prepared him for higher education.

“Montana State University is on its way to great things,” Cruzado said in an interview, echoing Gamble’s trademark optimism and penchant for bragging about MSU, its faculty and students.

"Customer service is a really big deal," Haffner said.

The students are learning responsibility — showing up to work on time is huge — as well as dealing with different people.