Weston Dennen

Thanks for visiting this site. I'm Weston Dennen, a first year student at the Abbey this fall. I have a busy summer planned and I was asked to share a little of it on the message board. I am sure there are a lot of Crusaders with interesting summers ahead and hopefully you will post some of your highlights as well. If you are thinking about the Abbey as a college prospect, I will let you know what brought me here and possibly help you in your college search.

I grew up in southern New Jersey just outside Philadelphia. I graduated this year from a mid size public high school. For the school, I played Soccer, Tennis, ran Cross Country and Bowled in the winter. I am going to continue to run at the Abbey for Brother Paul (the Abbeys Cross Country coach). I was in a wide variety of clubs in high school from Drama, Mock Trial and Chess Club to Science and Math League. I do a little volunteer work with the local youth sports leagues as well as my church, St. Charles. I have played the piano since I was seven and have also taken up the viola as a freshmen and have been in the high school orchestra for all four years. I work as a licensed New Jersey Soccer referee on the weekends. Games can vary from local recreational ball to high level MAPS play where I am part of a three man crew.

In my spare time, I enjoy gaming and simply hanging out relaxing. I prefer good horror and Sci-Fi movies and I am a big fan of 24 as well as Lost. I enjoy dressing well along with looking forward to proper dress events, especially formals. I have travelled quite a bit but my favorite places include the Alaskan glaciers, cliffs and rainforests of Maui and the Mayan ruins of Mexico. Being two hours from NYC and Washington DC, 1 hour from the Jersey shore and minutes from Philadelphia, there is always a lot to do.

Why the Abbey? I started my application process in October. I was accepted at twenty different schools varying from Tulane in Louisiana to Union College in upstate New York. I visited almost all of them and wherever I visited last was the college I liked the most. I soon realized that the urban schools were not for me. I didn't mind mid size schools like Villanova but I wanted a more personal relationship with my school so I looked harder at schools like Ursinus, Arcadia and Drew where I could maintain my identity and not fade into the crowd. The smaller schools seemed to offer more opportunity for me to remain involved in my current interests and explore a few new ones. I didn't want an extension of high school but I didn't want to be a social security number on the wall for mid term grades either. The last school I applied to was as you probably guessed, Belmont Abbey. I never heard of it. I kept getting emails from the Abbey and being overwhelmed with choices I deleted all of them except ONE. I went to the web site and browsed. They offer many things that I enjoy and have an outstanding acceptance rate to med school. Tuition was reasonable but the class size seemed a little small. My high school class was larger. Application was free so whats to lose. I sent off an application almost three months after all my others. Things usually happen for a reason. It is a Catholic College so if divine intervention can't occur here where else will it? I got my acceptance letter with a great scholarship package which meant a ten hour road trip to the Carolinas to check it out.

We drove down for accepted students day. We get there early in the morning (before 7 am) and decide to walk around the grounds. Who do we run into on the path who stops to talk? The Abbot! Later, we run into a pretty blonde coming out of the coffee shop who knows me. We never met this girl before nor has she ever seen us. It was Meghan Smith. It is a strange string of events when the first two people you meet randomly on campus are the Abbot and your admissions advisor! When you meet Meghan in person you will experience her enthusiasm that her web profile doesn't capture. During orientation we meet Brother Paul who returns later and has breakfast with my family and I. I am sure Brother Paul already ate and if he hadn't, he could have sat down with anyone. He sat down with us because I feel he had genuine interest. I got the same vibe from many people we met that day. During lunch we ate with a great girl from the Cross county team and a couple of Bio majors. We talked about many things and it was a good time. Maybe it was planned, maybe not but it was a nice friendly touch. President Thierfelders' speech was actually meaningful, unlike many of the canned speeches that we had sat through in the past. I felt that he was called to the Abbey for both the benefit of the college as well as his own. I could relate to many things he said. Here is a world class athlete and family guy with many kids of his own in charge of a college. How could you ask for anyone better? I left the orientation with a sense of being spoken to instead of being talked at. I left a Widener University orientation after the presidents speech because he spent 40 minutes citing numbers and statistics on how great his school was. It is my experience when people start tossing out a lot of numbers, they are usually full of it. After orientation my family and I took the tour accompanied only by a student tour guide. Everyone else seemed to be in groups which would have been fine but our guide liked the personal approach. Afterwards, Mr. Jones (admissions Director) himself went over my previous college and AP credits to see how many would transfer. Again a nice personal touch because he has an entire staff qualified to do so. We said our goodbyes and drove back knowing full well that I was going to return to the Abbey as a student. I found a special place and felt a sense of belonging already. It doesn't stop here. Over the course of the next few months, I received emails and phone calls from Meghan and Brother Paul just to check in and say hi. They were interested in how my classes and tennis season were going. When I visited the Abbey, they gave me a lucky "Got Monks" hat. This is an on going source of humor with Meghan as I never lost a varsity match when I wore the hat. I left it home once and lost. Never went without it again.

There it is. My Abbey experience and why I am coming. Great school, great weather, friendly people with God close by. I will try and post some pictures to give you an idea of who I am, what I am about and how I came to be on this board. I will look for some interesting things in Greece and Rome this July to post. Hopefully for those of you who browse will find some of it interesting. Comments are cool, good and bad, (hopefully not too bad). I've never done anything quite like this before so bear with me. Look forward to meeting all of you in August if not before. Enjoy the summer, stay safe and be well.

Weston