Five things every Flyer knows
We love UD — the friendships, the leadership opportunities, the faith formation. But in a time of doubts about institutions of higher education, it’s fair to ask what a Catholic, Marianist university is good for.
Turns out, quite a bit. We break down five things every Flyer already knows — and what prospective students are just discovering — about what UD offers to its students, the community and our world.
1: UD cultivates capable professionals — and good people.
Flyers know their fellow alumni are capable and kind, the sort of people who both excel in their careers and are committed to making their communities better places.
“Our students aren’t limited to experiential learning that’s just within their major,” Karen Velasquez, UD’s director of experiential learning, said. “They’re very much interested in leadership roles and putting what they’re learning into practice.”
This commitment to both professional excellence and community impact shows up across campus. Student leaders mentor their peers, run business enterprises, advocate for causes and partner with community organizations.
“For them, leadership isn’t just about getting ahead,” Velasquez said. “It’s working together with others and learning how to do that well.”
The University’s Catholic, Marianist identity shapes this distinctive approach. “The Marianists really talk about community being something where you experience God’s love, and then you reflect that love out into the world,” said Meaghan Crowley ’13, director of the Center for Social Concern in Campus Ministry. “Communities are where you come to be nurtured and fueled, then go do the work that you’re called to do in the world around you.”
That work manifests in many ways. “It can mean being an active citizen in your local community. It can mean being an advocate for the common good in your everyday life. It could mean doing your job to the very best that you know how to do it,” she said.
The impact extends far beyond graduation. Students develop skills to be active citizens wherever life takes them, bringing their talents to school boards, neighborhood associations and community organizations. As Crowley put it, “Everyone has the ability to make an impact in some way, shape or form in their local community. Allowing students to think about how they can make an impact can be really powerful for students who maybe haven’t thought about themselves in that way.”
Flyers know that UD cultivates the kind of ethical, capable leaders the world needs now more than ever.
2: UD’s research prowess is making the world better.
Flyers know research happens in every discipline at the University and, importantly, at the undergraduate level. For example, at the most recent Stander Symposium, a daylong celebration of mentored student research and artistic accomplishments, 1,046 Flyers presented original research on topics as varied as sickle cell disease management, investment portfolio weighting models, achievement gaps among multilingual students and generative AI images.
The research students do has real impacts on real people. For example, students involved with UD’s Human Rights Center don’t just learn about global justice — they help advance it. The center is an interdisciplinary hub where education, research and advocacy intersect, said Satang Nabaneh, its director of programs.
This intersection has come alive in projects like analyzing satellite imagery to investigate forced displacement in Myanmar and to identify mass graves in Syria. A current project examining the rights of women and girls of African descent brings together UD students with peers from the University of the Bahamas to analyze hundreds of documents from United Nations treaty bodies. Their findings will help shape international policy during the U.N. Second International Decade for People of African Descent.
Perhaps most striking is how the center leverages what Nabaneh calls the University’s “convening power.” By bringing together students, international organizations and community partners, UD creates spaces where meaningful change can take root. A recent conference on decolonization and development, co-hosted with universities in South Africa, exemplifies this approach — turning academic discussions into action through ongoing research and advocacy.
“We’re not just doing a conference for the sake of conference,” Nabaneh said, “but really trying to ensure that the work we’ve put in, the gathering we’ve facilitated and all the discussions that have taken place actually lead to tangible results.”
And then there is the University of Dayton Research Institute. Call it a triple threat. UDRI is No. 1 among all colleges and universities in the nation for sponsored research and development in materials engineering. It’s No. 1 among Ohio’s colleges and universities for federally sponsored research and development in engineering. And it’s No. 1 among Catholic colleges and universities in the nation for sponsored R&D in both engineering and materials.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s changing our possibilities in our world — and other worlds, too.
Take energy production in extreme environments. UDRI is currently working on plug-and-play power systems for lunar missions with the support of a NASA contract. Specifically, its researchers are designing, building and testing the heat source for a generator designed to support lunar missions in the extreme cold of two-week-long lunar nights. It may be ready for lunar missions as early as 2027.
The technology is being developed for use on Earth, too. The company leading the lunar power project, Zeno Power, is also working with UDRI on a project funded by a U.S. Department of Defense contract to develop decentralized power nodes on ocean seabeds. These nodes will serve as charging stations for autonomous undersea vehicles.
Cheering “Go Flyers!” in the hometown of the Wright brothers? Every Flyer knows it’s a rallying cry with innovation in its DNA.
3: UD and Dayton are good for each other — and a national model.
When James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic, looked for an exemplar of university-city partnership, he found it in what every Flyer already knows: the distinctive relationship between UD and the city of Dayton. He summarized the University’s thinking about Dayton in language every Flyer can recognize: “[W]e rise or fall together. Let us prepare our students for their broad global possibilities by teaching them responsibility for where we are now.”
UD’s president, Eric F. Spina, elaborated on this thinking in conversation with Fallows. “The city’s name is in our name,” he told Fallows. “The health and vibrancy of the city, especially of the urban core, are central to our ability to exist. …
Bringing vitality to this city and region really is an existential question for us.”
The University has embraced its position as an anchor institution: It contributed its reputation, people and a lease to the restoration of the Dayton Arcade downtown. It invested in the ongoing redevelopment of OnMain, the land formerly occupied by the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, and the acquisition of the former NCR headquarters and land. It also recently opened the Roger Glass Center for the Arts, a new arts center open to the community.
Make no mistake: The benefits of these and other community partnerships are mutual. They ensure that UD students get the best possible education. More than 500 courses at UD include experiential learning components that send students out to work with partners in the community. During these experiences, Flyers apply their knowledge to real-world challenges, learn to collaborate with community partners, manage projects and communicate effectively with diverse populations.
Opportunities within the Dayton area dovetail nicely with opportunities beyond it. One example is UD’s long-running Summer Appalachia Program. Each summer, students travel to Salyersville, Kentucky, for eight weeks to work in partnership with local residents. They run a day camp and a teen center, and they volunteer at a nursing home. This year, it celebrates its 60th year and epitomizes UD’s commitment to lasting engagement in community with others.
As Spina put it:
“I believe that education is optimized if we get students out of their bubble.”
4: Flyers find their faith and themselves while at UD.
Every Flyer knows that the opportunity to explore faith and meaning is an ongoing invitation for students of every faith — and none at all.
Campus Ministry is at the center of these opportunities. It offers services, retreats, pilgrimages and other programming to help students pursue their faith, whether that faith is Catholic or something else. In the Marianist tradition, people of all faiths are welcome on campus. The University sees its faith mission as walking alongside them.
Big impacts happen with something as small as a Thursday evening prayer service. Joshua Michonski ’23 talked about their impact on him in May of his senior year. “Regardless of how the busyness of life could fill my time during the day, the night prayer always invited me to take time for closeness with God,” he said. “When the time for [the service] came around, I knew my week was nearly over and I could find rest.”
The School of Business Administration’s Center for the Integration of Faith and Work is one example of how this approach looks in an academic context. Last summer it converted an old receptionist room into a mini retreat space where students can rest, pray, reflect and study. Another of its offerings is the Walk the Talk sessions where students explore ethics and religion in commerce and the workplace with local business leaders.
The late Brother Victor Forlani, S.M. ’65, who founded the center in 2009 while Marianist-in-residence at the business school, centered Walk the Talk luncheons around ethical conundrums without easy answers. “We have the kids wrestle with these things,” Forlani told a reporter. “That will stay with them.”
Experiences such as that help students think about bigger questions beyond just landing their first job. Students crave that opportunity for reflection, Crowley said.
“As much as they’re looking for employment, they’re also looking for purpose and direction. UD offers students both.”
For some students, it leads to concentrated exploration after graduation. Claire Snyder ’23 wrote about her decision to spend a year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest after she finished her degree. “I knew I wanted to keep chasing the light and love that had entered my life [at UD],” she wrote in a blog for Campus Ministry.
The impact was life-altering. “I experienced a mindset shift, allowing me to now see more hope in every day and more beauty in the ordinary,” she wrote. “The year taught me how to choose presence and mindfulness, how to appreciate what is around me, and how to use my privilege and voice to do what I can to care for my community and our common home.”
UD cares for the whole person and affirms the inherent dignity of each person. This commitment is fundamental to UD’s pursuit of a common mission while being a community made up of persons of diverse backgrounds — including religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, nationality, gender and ability. Maybe that’s why Flyers connect so easily with one another, even if they’ve never met before. All alumni recognize the power of finding themselves through community.
5: A UD degree is a Swiss Army Knife for the brain — flexible, nimble and ready for anything.
The founder of the Marianistbrothers, Father William Joseph Chaminade, memorably observed, “New times call for new methods.” It was a call for adaptability as a core value. This spirit infuses a UD education and ensures students develop the flexibility and critical-thinking skills needed for an unpredictable future. Call it future-proofing.
For evidence that UD educates Flyers to roll with change, look no further than the Davis Center for Portfolio Management in the business school. Through the ups and downs of market fluctuations over 25 years, the 700-plus students who have worked there have grown $15 million allocated from the endowment over the years to a portfolio of more than $80 million as of 2024. It is the largest student-managed investment fund in the nation.
Adaptation and change are watchwords for how UD thinks about its curriculum — and how it revises it. UD is currently rolling out a reimagining of the Common Academic Program. CAP provides all students with a foundation in the liberal arts regardless of their major. Faculty and administrators are thoughtfully revising the program to give students more agency in shaping their educational journeys.
“Students want to have more flexibility and autonomy,” Erin O’Mara Kunz, a psychology professor and the president of UD’s Academic Senate, said. “I’ve heard from students who are engineers and have a double major in philosophy. Those kinds of combinations are really exciting for students.
... [The CAP revision] gives them the opportunity to diversify what they’re taking, which can only help them become better citizens of the world and better critical thinkers.”
Flyers know they can count on each other and the University to be, in the spirit of Father Chaminade, adaptable and solution-focused as new challenges and opportunities continue to emerge.
Now we pose the question to you, dear Flyer: What’s UD good for? Email magazine@udayton.edu and tell us more about why the world is — and you are — better with UD in it. Every Flyer knows.
Illustrations by Allan Sanders
A version of this article appears in print in the Spring 2025 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 34. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE