5 things learned recently from the Baylor Connections podcast
On a campus of nearly 20,000 students — and with 160,000+ living alumni — there’s no shortage of great stories to tell from within the Baylor Family.
Baylor Magazine and BaylorProud share many of them in a written format, and Baylor Connections does the same in audio/video form. Now 19 episodes into its latest season, Connections this year has featured guests ranging from President Linda Livingstone and new Director of Athletics Doug McNamee to top Baylor researchers, student life leaders, and more.
As a sampling of what Connections has to offer, here are five things listeners learned from the podcast recently:
1) Baylor aims to provide transformational experiences in a transactional world.
“We care deeply about the holistic development of our student-athletes and that we create a transformational experience for them as an athlete, but also in terms of their academics, their spiritual development and social development. And so in a world where there’s a lot of pressure to be very transactional as a student-athlete, I’m proud of our coaches for bringing in players that certainly want to be great athletes and care about that, but also care about the other aspects of their development. That doesn’t change, no matter how much college athletics changes.”
— President Livingstone, speaking from Duke University during BU women’s basketball’s NCAA tournament run
2) Baylor’s world-class facilities attract world-class professors.
“You could think about the movie Field of Dreams: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ This was really a great vision on the part of the Baylor administration and the faculty that were here at the time, to build a facility [the Baylor Sciences Building] that would serve to attract cutting-edge research scientists to move us towards the R1 goal that they had set. The most valuable resource we have is not the building or the equipment, though — it’s the students doing great work.”
— Dr. John Wood, chair of Baylor’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
3) Baylor professors apply their Christian mission even in areas where that might not be obvious.
“One of the exciting distinctives at Baylor is that our faculty really do have really a faith-integrated perspective that they not only bring to their classroom, but they also bring to the questions they ask in their research. And you might think, ‘Oh, what faith perspective can you bring to trucking, or inventory management, or supply negotiation?’ But people are engaged in all of those spaces… I think one of the unique distinctives of our faculty is our human focus and the approach that a lot of us take to ethical and sustainable supply chain strategies in our work.”
— Dr. Hannah Stolze, Baylor’s Crenshaw Endowed Chair in Supply Chain Management
4) Creating great fan experiences is a high priority for Baylor Athletics.
“Our broad philosophy is to reduce the points of friction for the consumer. In this day and age, every game, essentially, is on TV. You can be a fan and never leave your couch. We really have to earn people’s willingness to make an effort to come to games. That’s really a responsibility for us to reflect and say, ‘What are the points of friction that make this difficult, and how can we help eliminate those where possible?’”
5) Baylor’s distinct role as a Christian research university allows us to serve people around the world.
“That Christian element of being dedicated to worldwide leadership and service permeates through everything that we do. It really allows us on a global scale to connect with institutions that we wouldn’t be able to connect with — say, small Christian universities if we were just an R1, or if we were just a Christian university without the R1 element, we wouldn’t be able to connect with some of the major research universities. But at Baylor, we have partnerships with institutions like Christ University and Oxford University. They’re very different institutions, but because we are uniquely situated to work with both, that puts us in a league that is very distinctive and very unique amongst U.S. higher education, and indeed, global higher education.”
— Dr. Eddie Contreras, vice provost for global engagement
Future Baylor Connections episodes will focus on student Fulbright winners, the new student experience at Baylor, research experiences, and more. You can subscribe to the program on iTunes or the Baylor YouTube channel to have them delivered to you.
Sic ’em, Baylor Connections!