Welcome to Western Washington University

Tour stop audio transcript

Welcome to Western Washington University! My name is Graciela, and my name is Spencer. We're excited to show you our campus! Before we get started, let me show you how you can interact with this virtual tour. If you'd like to skip to the next stop, click the next stop button to the right. To jump to a particular location along the tour, you can use the pop out menu to the left or click directly on the map at the bottom left-hand corner of the page. To get a more in-depth look at each location you can click the multimedia box near the bottom right-hand corner for 360-degree photos, videos and more. Using the icons in the bottom right-hand corner, from left to right, you can view an accessible version of this tour, read the transcript from each stop, mute our voiceover, change languages, share our virtual tour experience on social media, or view the tour in full screen or via a virtual reality headset. In addition to the online tour you are about to take, we offer guided campus tours twice a day, Monday through Saturday. To book a tour just click on the "Schedule Visit" tab in the top right-hand corner. I would like to start this virtual tour by acknowledging that Western's campus is on the ancestral homelands of the Coast Salish Peoples, who have lived in the Salish Sea basin, throughout the San Juan Islands and the North Cascades watershed, from time immemorial. Please join me in expressing our deepest respect and gratitude for our indigenous neighbors, the Lummi Nation and Nooksack Tribe, for their enduring care and protection of our shared lands and waterways. Western Washington University is a mid-size Liberal Arts university made up of about 16,000 students, 95 percent of whom are undergraduates. With such a heavy focus on the undergraduate experience, research opportunities, student government positions and other ways to get involved present themselves to students early on in their education. Students love our small class sizes, averaging at 27 with a student-faculty ratio of 18 to 1. We'll start our tour at the Performing Arts Center Plaza, which features a spectacular view of Bellingham Bay. The Downtown district is just a short 15-minute walk from Western, and is home to a ton of locally-owned businesses, restaurants and coffee shops. With a city-wide population of nearly 90,000 people – not including Western students – there is always something for students to do on or off campus. The Performing Arts Center (or PAC) itself is home to the Department of Music and the Department of Theatre and Dance. The building has three performance spaces with over 1700 seats in total, and hosts dozens of rehearsal spaces for students to use. With nearly 300 performances per year, the plays, concerts, musicals and recitals, both student- and professionally-produced, that take place in the PAC are cultural cornerstones of Western's community. Anyone can participate in the performing arts programs, whether you are auditioning to perform or are faithful members of the audience.