Northern Today

Founded more than a century ago as a regional teacher’s college, Northern Michigan University has grown into a major comprehensive university. When it opened its doors in 1899, Northern enrolled thirty-two students who were taught by six faculty members on a 22-acre campus. Today, it enrolls nearly 8,700 students who are taught by 350 faculty on a main campus of 336 acres. What has not changed is Northern’s reputation for excellent and innovative educational opportunities, its caring faculty and staff, and its natural setting of exquisite beauty.

Located in Marquette, Michigan, a city of 20,000, Northern offers the best features of rural and urban living in a safe and clean environment. The physical campus currently includes fifty-six buildings encompass 3.2 million square feet and are connected by thirteen miles of sidewalk and three miles of roadway. Northern dedicated its latest and largest-ever facilities project, the state-of-the-art Seaborg Science Complex, in October 2001. The Superior Dome, one of Northern’s most recognizable and versatile facilities, is unique in that it is the world’s largest wooden dome. Additionally, no building on campus is more than a few minutes walk from miles of Lake Superior shoreline.

Within this impressive natural setting, Northern Michigan University offers over 180 programs in 32 different departments with credentialing that ranges from certificates and associate degrees to master’s degrees. Northern’s faculty, over eighty percent of whom hold the doctorate or highest degree in their field, are committed to teaching as well as to research and professional development. NMU is one of only three colleges or universities in Michigan to serve a community college function.

Continuing Northern’s tradition of educational innovation, the Teaching, Learning, and Communication initiative places a notebook computer in the hands of every full-time undergraduate student and makes NMU one of the largest public university laptop programs in the world. Northern’s campus-wide effort for technological mastery helps NMU students compete in the high-tech global marketplace after they graduate.

Students, however, need to master more than textbooks and technological skills to succeed, and they receive training in social and group skills and professional interaction through more than two hundred student organizations. Several of these are nationally recognized, such as Northern’s Student Leader Fellowship program which was recently cited in The Templeton Guide: Colleges that Encourage Character Development.

There are also six centers of excellence at NMU: the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurialism, the Center for Upper Peninsula Studies, the Center for Native American Studies, the Glenn T. Seaborg Center for Teaching and Learning Science and Mathematics, the Upper Peninsula Center for Educational Development, and the United States Olympic Education Center, the latter being the only U.S. Olympic training center with an education and athletic mission.

Northern’s vision for its second hundred years is to be the university of choice in the Midwest for students seeking quality academics and an outstanding collegiate experience with personal attention in a high-tech learning environment.

For international admission information, e-mail oia@nmu.edu or visit http://www.nmu.edu/admissions/admissions1/intlapp.htm