Classes at Colby College resume on Wednesday, Sept. 9, though students have been returning to campus for more than a week for pre-semester activities, including outdoor orientation trips for first-year students.

This year's freshman class at Colby includes 458 men and women from across the country and around the world. Selected from more than 4,000 applicants, the class of 2002 includes 40 students who either were valedictorians or salutatorians in their high schools. Two members of the class, from Denmark and Zimbabwe, are recipients of a new Colby-Oak Foundation scholarship program for international students. The college also is awaiting the arrival of Zafaryab Ahmed, a journalist who will be the inaugural fellow of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. He currently is detained in Pakistan pending a court hearing on whether he may travel to the U.S. for the fellowship.

Students will return to a newly remodeled Dana Hall, which underwent $5 million in renovations to both residential and dining facilities this summer. Construction continues on a $7 million apartment complex for Colby seniors and a $1.5 million wing on the Colby College Museum of Art, with both buildings scheduled to open at the end of this academic year. A new photo identification and security system for students, faculty and staff will be implemented this fall.

All but a handful of the first-year students are participating in the Colby Outdoor Orientation Trip (COOT) program, taking trips and working on service projects around the state. The trips are designed to introduce students to an initial circle of friends and to give them opportunities to ask student trip leaders questions about life at Colby before the academic year gets underway.

With the beginning of Colby's academic year comes the resumption of arts and cultural activities including lectures, concerts and theater. Free lectures that are open to the public begin with talks by journalist Ben Fong-Torres at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 6, and by actor Edward James Olmos at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 13, both in Cotter Union. The first concert in the Music at Colby series is a faculty recital at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 13 in Lorimer Chapel. Ongoing exhibits at the Colby Museum of Art include "John Marin in Maine" though September 27, "Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses" through October 11 and "Photographs by Berenice Abbott" through November 1.