Your Residential Experience
The Wake Forest experience is deep, layered, and designed to challenge and support the development of the whole student simultaneously. Our entire campus is a classroom. Here, living and learning are forever combined within a diverse community. The residential commons model is intentionally designed to connect students to the resources they will need to thrive at Wake Forest.
In many ways, a deeply connected residential experience is not new to Wake Forest. The commitment shown to each student by our faculty and staff is, and has been, a foundational element of an ever-evolving engaged liberal arts model. By branding, documenting, and building an even more supportive structure around a strong culture of community, we are further enhancing what makes Wake Forest distinct.
Within this residential experience, we will curate an environment in which students can make their home – a home where living and learning are inseparable.
Where You Belong
The freedom to be exactly who you are and explore who you want to be, surrounded by the resources necessary for each student to reach their full potential.
Pillars of The Forest
These focus areas help guide the programming efforts within The Forest.
Personal Development
Encourage students to create a home at Wake Forest by embracing and cultivating a personally enriching sense of identity, balance, and wellbeing.
Life of the Mind
Promote in students a commitment to lifelong learning through curiosity about the workings of the world and the lives and experiences of other people.
Community & Belonging
Develop in students an openness to difference, diverse knowledge, community with others, meaningful relationships, and respect for the many ways of living the human experience.
Pro Humanitate
Educate and develop leaders of character, integrity, and courage who embody Pro Humanitate.
Layers of Support
A healthy forest has strong roots.
The residential commons model meets students where they are with support, encouragement and guidance. From day one, every student automatically belongs to a residential community within the broader Wake Forest community. Within each residence hall, we have created smaller groups designed to connect students to each other, to residential and academic advisers, to Faculty Fellows and to the many resources available to them as they navigate their new university.
Any successful relationship requires effort, intention and communication to be a 2-way street. The goal of establishing deeper connections between students and their Wake Forest experience extends beyond support and into the personal empowerment necessary for each student to write their own story.
Wake Forest’s residence halls are a place for our students to call their own. Here, they will meet peers and build relationships through events, gatherings and shared spaces intentionally designed for them to establish a real sense of community. This is also a setting where they will begin to know and understand the many layers of support available to all.
- Resident advisers are undergraduate student leaders responsible for building a sense of community, connecting students to each other, and the resources available to help them.
- All students will be assigned to a wing or hall within a larger residential community.
Everyone will navigate the beginning of their college experience with guidance and support, and each student belongs to an academic advising group that will share this experience together. This will also be a setting where academic advisers frequently augment more formal, office-related interactions with an informal presence that encourages the building of lasting faculty-student relationships.
- Students will be assigned to a core cohort of students, typically all residing within the same hall.
- This cohort will attend first-year activities and events together.
- Here, academic advisers and student advisers are available within an informal setting to increase approachability and facilitate relationship-building.
Strong student-faculty relationships are a cornerstone of the Wake Forest experience. Faculty Fellows are faculty members affiliated with each residence hall to foster engagement, to support and advise students, and to create experiences designed to connect residential communities.
- Faculty Fellows spend time each week in the residence halls, supporting students in a variety of ways.
- Faculty Fellows represent a range of academic disciplines, ultimately exposing students to many academic fields.
- They will host events, trips and other activities designed to bring students together.
- A strong and positive relationship with faculty will increase the comfort students feel when approaching course faculty for help or guidance.