The goal of most incoming freshmen is to sometime in the future walk down during Commencement and shake the hand of their college dean while being presented with a degree. Ohio State’s First Year Experience program hopes to give students all the resources and motivation they need to get to that day.
In a presentation last month to the university’s Board of Trustees, Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Admissions and First Year Experience, Mabel Freeman, said the FYE program is committed to helping first-year students succeed and graduate from OSU. Freeman said the FYE program concentrates on several distinct objectives to assist students during their first year on campus.
“The goal is to effectively integrate first-year freshman and transfer students into the university community,” Freeman said. “There are three parts of this integration: Communication, orientation and involvement.”
A key goal of Freeman’s is to increase retention rates of first-year students returning to the university. She said even though OSU’s retention rate, around 84 percent last year, is higher than the national average, her goal is to eventually reach 90 percent retention after the first year, she said.
“If we get them back for a second year, we can get them graduated,” Freeman said.
As a result, the FYE program is developing many new initiatives to improve retention rates. One of them is the Stradley Hall Math Project, which debuted this quarter.
“Students were assigned floors in Stradley Hall based on who was in their math recitation section,” Freeman said.
“We think this will help students form study groups. The math department will also be offering special tutoring and review sessions (in Stradley Hall).”
To encourage immediate involvement, the FYE program started the campus-wide Buckeye Book Community, Freeman said. All incoming students were encouraged to read one of two books, “Night” by Elie Wiesel or “Brothers and Sisters” by Bebe Moore Campbell, and then participate in discussions with faculty when they arrived on campus.
“We were hoping that maybe 1,000 freshmen would buy one of these books. Our campus bookstores sold 3,500 copies to new freshmen and their families,” Freeman said. “We think these are a group of students coming here, saying ‘I want to be involved.’ “
Creating an awareness and appreciation of all the various OSU traditions is another important cornerstone of the FYE program, Freeman said. As a result, all first-year students received a special scarlet and gray tassel as Convocation last week to help link them to campus.
“We want each student to hang it up in their bedroom as a constant reminder that down the road, they will wear the tassel colors of their college at graduation,” Freeman said. “Convocation is one end of the bookend, graduation is the other.”
Freeman said that an FYE newsletter and Web site will be started this year to help answer the questions of first-year students. Students will be able to personally solicit advice from experienced OSU students via the e-mail address, [email protected], she said.
Other initiatives by the FYE program include the introduction of the First Year Success Series. As a complement to the required first-year survey course new students will choose from 70 different programs over seven weeks designed to introduce them to life at OSU, Freeman said. The program topics range from managing finances and developing leadership skills, to alcohol education and diversity awareness.
Freeman also gave a snapshot of the entering class profile, noting that over one-third of them will have graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class and over two-thirds of them will have graduated in the top 25 percent. Freeman said that increases would be seen in the number of African American, Asian American, Hispanic and Native American students enrolling at OSU.
“This will be the most talented and diverse class ever to come to the Ohio State University,” Freeman said.
