LEWISTON — Bates College’s newest students — 498 from 40 states and 25 countries — were welcomed Tuesday in a convocation ceremony accompanied by speeches and the Portland Brass Quintet.

“Today is when we call you together to constitute you formally as the Class of 2018 and to mark your entry into the academic community that is Bates College,” President A. Clayton Spencer said. “The next time you will be together as a class, just you, will be in late May 2018, when you walk across this same stage, if we are lucky with the weather, and receive your diplomas. Think of convocation and commencement as the bookends of your college experience.”

The ceremony was held in front of the columned Coram Library. Spencer and others spoke beneath Bates’ trademarked seal and motto, “Amore ac studio condita,” translated as “with ardor and devotion.”

Alyssa Morgosh, president of the college’s student government, encouraged the newbies to venture off campus and get to know people independent of the school.

“I am saying to you — and wholeheartedly believe — you have chosen the best of all possible college towns,” said Morgosh, a senior. “If you do not invest time in building mutually beneficial relationships in the Lewiston community and expand beyond our campus property, you will pass over countless opportunities to partake in one of the greatest assets of Bates College.”

Matthew Auer, the school’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, asked the first-year students to become discoverers, to be patient with seemingly tedious assignments and eager with challenges.

They are things not always asked of earlier generations of young scholars, he said.

“You’re entering an age of guided discovery rather than ready-made, received wisdom,” Auer said. “That means that Bates’ faculty and staff are experts at helping you curate your own discoveries.

“Why not tell you what’s important?” Auer said. “Precisely because it wouldn’t be as important to you as the liberating experience of finding your way into big questions, harvesting some answers and locating the next set of big questions.”

Spencer asked the new students to rely on each other and get to know the people on campus, whether they sat among the robed professors or cleaned their dorm hallways or mowed the grass in the quad.

“Look around at each other,” she said. “Look around at everyone you see on this quad. We are all ‘us.'”

Almost 46 percent of the new students are New England residents. About 22 percent come from the mid-Atlantic states, 12 percent from the Southwest and West, 7 percent from the Southeast and 8 percent from other countries.

Countries represented range from Vietnam to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

About 10 percent of the students represent their family’s first generation to attend college.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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