Dec 03, 2024  
BVU Academic Catalog 2024-2025 
    
BVU Academic Catalog 2024-2025

A Message From the President


Welcome, students, to the Buena Vista University family! Your BVU family includes your classmates, people who are going to become lifelong friends. Your BVU family includes the faculty and staff who teach, coach, mentor, and serve you. Finally, your BVU family includes the alumni and benefactors who support you through internships, scholarships, fellowships, and gifts that create and sustain your learning environment.

Our mascot is the Beavers, and we are known for building. We help build you up personally and professionally so that you can build a better life for yourself, your family, and your community.

Whether you are coming to BVU right out of high school, transferring from another college, returning to school after being out for a while, or pursuing a graduate degree, your BVU family will challenge you to go beyond where you’ve gone before, and we support you along the way.

Our mission is to prepare students for lifelong success through transformational educational experiences.

To prepare students for lifelong success, the faculty and staff have identified three signature skills that are essential. They are: effective communication, problem solving, and integrative learning. Throughout your experiences inside and outside the classroom, you will see lots of opportunities to grow in your ability to communicate effectively with others, to solve problems you encounter, and to integrate learning by applying what you have studied in each of your classes to what you are doing in your career or community. Equipped with these three signature skills, you will be poised for lifelong success.

The other key component to our mission statement is that we offer transformational programs. Buena Vista’s academic and professional programs, regardless of how you attend, and residential campus co-curricular experiences are full of opportunities for personal transformation. The signs entering the State of Iowa have the slogan “fields of opportunity”. Opportunity abounds at BVU. You can chart your own path to transformation. We are here to help you succeed.

Go Beavers! Time to start building!

Best regards,

Brian A. Lenzmeier, Ph.D.
President