Current Students

Walk into St. Joseph Commons during lunch hour, and you are likely to see Daniel Selmeczy (’08), sitting amid a group of students, avidly conversing about their studies and their goals. A student was once overheard asking, “When does that guy ever stop working?”

By Hope Ascough (CA ’22)

Dear Mom and Dad,

To help ease the financial burden that the coronavirus and its attendant lockdowns have inflicted on students and their families, the Thomas Aquinas College Board of Governors has voted to freeze the cost of tuition and room & board for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Students at Thomas Aquinas College, New England, woke this morning to a welcome surprise that will help them make it through first-semester examinations — care packages, courtesy of their peers at Thomas Aquinas College, California.

“I got the idea from my own family, which has sent me care packages during past exam weeks,” says Robert Santine, a junior on the California campus who organized the Advent effort. “I thought it would be nice to have some kind of gesture of good will between the campuses.”

“I wanted to get a good idea of what was really worth doing, what’s life really about?” says Jordan Raum (’22) of Anthem, Arizona. “I wanted to spend time taking that question really seriously.”

Dear Friend.

“Coming back to teach here feels like a homecoming,” says Dr. Scott Strader, a member of the Class of 1997 who is, indeed, returning to his alma mater — but only after a 23-year absence that brought him to Iraq and Japan as an officer of the United States Navy, to Rome as a graduate student, and from agnosticism to the Catholic faith.

Dr. Strader’s return to the College may not have followed a predictable route, but, then, neither did his arrival as a student. Scott grew up as a Baptist Christian in rural Indiana, but he decidedly left his Christian faith as a young teenager.

“I had Marcus Berquist for his last class, for Junior Theology,” says Dr. John McCarthy (’11), remembering the late Thomas Aquinas College co-founder and tutor whose influence would help lead him to one day become an educator himself. “He had intellectual charity. He did a lot of good through sharing his education. It was inspiring.”

For the better part of two decades, rising high school seniors from across the U.S. and the world have come to Thomas Aquinas College for two weeks each summer with one thought on their minds: Do I want to spend my next four years here? Ever since the College opened its East Coast campus in 2019, they have also had an additional question to consider: California or New England?

Although the first semester of Thomas Aquinas College’s 2020-21 academic year included many more challenges than usual, students and faculty carried on with the essential work of Catholic liberal education. As they read and discussed their way through the College’s classical curriculum, they encountered deeper truths and ever more of the connections that unify the disciplines. Below is a list of a few highlights, as expressed by members of each class, from the recently completed fall semester.