By Lori Bredemeyer, Copy Editor

High school and university students alike soaked in a campus energized by Sing Song this weekend.

The university conducted Preview Weekend for prospective students Friday and Saturday.

About 150 prospective students preregistered for the weekend and several more attended, said Dana Jaworski, enrollment services manager.

The visitors were shown three aspects of the university: campus life, spiritual life and academics. Gretchen Etheridge, enrollment services representative, said the students attended Chapel, went to an academic showcase to meet representatives from each department and sat in on classes.

“It’s a great day for them to experience academics at ACU by going to class and meeting with those departments, and spiritual life by going to Chapel and just being around the student body,” Etheridge said. “You get a very good feel for that.”

Etheridge said the campus life experience comes from being around university students.

“Our students are really kind, good people,” Etheridge said, “and they do want to make sure that [high schoolers] like ACU and have good things to go back home and feel about it.”

The visitors were also invited to attend a devotional in Hart Auditorium with Dr. Bill Rankin, professor of English, speaking on Christians in mass media. Etheridge said Rankin spoke about The Matrix to tie the theme to Sing Song’s Silver Screen.

“We wanted something about how Christians have to be counter-cultural,” she said, “and what’s out there and how we view that.”

Jaworski said the best feed back came about the academic showcase, and several prospective students filled out housing request forms and paid the $100 deposit.

Etheridge added that the guests usually say they had a lot of fun and say good things about the weekend.

“Basically they give us feedback that we wanted to hear, like, ‘I got to see a little bit of everything,’ ‘ACU was awesome,’ and ‘I had so much fun.'”