PRESIDENT’S OFFICE

President’s Message

Dear BAU Family, 

Every university tells you where it’s going. I’d rather tell you where we’ve been — because that’s the honest measure of what your degree will mean. 

We started in 2014 with a single MBA cohort and one conviction: a serious education should launch a life, not mortgage it. That belief still runs through everything we do. It’s why more than $18.5 million in scholarships has gone to students since we opened our doors — domestic and international alike. It’s why our classrooms now hold students from more than 40 countries, each one bringing a perspective the rest of us didn’t have before they arrived. 

We are young. That’s not a weakness — it’s the reason we move quickly, listen closely, and change when the world tells us to. 

The proof came the hard way. In March 2023, Bay Atlantic University earned accreditation from the New England Commission of Higher Education — one of the most rigorous accrediting bodies in the country. Along the way, our MBA became one of the largest in Washington, D.C., and our cybersecurity education earned national recognition. None of that arrived by luck. It arrived because students, faculty, and staff decided to build something that would last. 

Our founder, a lifelong educational entrepreneur, put it plainly: “Those who do not have dreams will not reap a reality.” I have watched that sentence prove true more times than I can count. 

I won’t pretend the road was smooth. The pandemic stopped the world in a matter of days — jobs, economies, whole ways of living, gone almost overnight. We lost people we loved. We sat in the same uncertainty everyone else did. And still, the university grew. We added programs, opened housing, and kept our promise to students who were counting on us. That is what resilience actually looks like: not the absence of hard times, but the refusal to be defined by them. 

So here is what I want you to know, whether you’re arriving for your first semester or reading this years after you crossed our commencement stage. 

To our new students: bring your dreams with you. We built this place for people with bright minds and generous hearts, and we mean to give you the knowledge, the skills, and the experience to turn those dreams into something real. Our values — respect, diversity, integrity, and academic achievement — aren’t words on a wall. They’re the standard we’ll hold you to, and the standard you can hold us to in return. 

To our alumni: this is still your university. Every ranking, every new program, every student who graduates without a mountain of debt — that’s your story continuing. You helped write the first chapters. We’d like you to stay in the ones we’re writing now. 

I can’t promise you a life free of failure. That would be a lie, and you’d see through it. What I can promise is this: if you learn from the hard moments, you’ll write new stories of success — and you’ll write them from a place that believed in you before you had proof to offer. 

Welcome home. 

Very truly yours,

Dr. Sinem Vatanartiran

President, Bay Atlantic University

Selen Oz | Chief of Staff

Phone #: +1 (202) 644-7200
Email: [email protected]