A kinder, gentler freshman year

MAYBE YOU REMEMBER FRESHMAN YEAR AT COLLEGE as a nightmare: Huge lectures, remote professors racing through overwhelming material, hours studying physics, calculus, and chemistry that seemed irrelevant to engineering, and a panicky feeling of isolation.

You might have very different memories if you had enrolled in a program like the one at the University of Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In only its second year, the Student Excellence Initiatives effort has created a support system that has changed the experience and boosted the retention rate of incoming freshmen.

Ninety percent of students who participated in the initiative returned to SEAS for their sophomore year, compared with only 63 percent who returned without benefit of the program. Most of the students reported the program boosted their grades, as well. "We want students to realize that engineering school is not there to fail them but to teach them," says associate dean Michael Ryan, who put the program into place.

The program's director--and its heart--is Bill Wild, who earned dual degrees in engineering and English at the University of Buffalo 22 years ago. On a fast-track career at the Rand Corporation, Wild left to teach science to Los Angeles teenage gang members. When the University of Buffalo approached him with the idea for Student Excellence Initiatives, Wild seized the chance to apply his experience from Los Angeles in a university setting. "Engineering students by definition are an at-risk population because of the difficulty of the curriculum," Wild says, citing the national dropout rate of 50 percent before junior year. "I knew there was more we could do to keep the challenges but reduce the pain level."

To establish a sense of community for freshmen and sophomores, Wild and Ryan developed an approach based on personal attention. Opening Day is now a team-oriented event with challenges that are fun like like building indoor-flying kites.

"We try to initiate relationships and strike a chord that will reverberate as the semester goes on," Wild says.

Students can volunteer for weekly small group meetings with faculty members in physics, chemistry, and calculus to improve their study skills and identify personal areas of weakness.

Combined with a newly strengthened faculty mentoring program, this has translated into a support system to meet the individual needs of first-year students making the transition from high school to a demanding and often unforgiving curriculum.

"For the past 18 years these students have done well or they wouldn't be pursuing engineering degrees," Wild says. "Until now they've never seen anything like a 60 before except on a speedometer."

The standard engineering introductory course has been revamped to become "Case Studies in Engineering," requiring teams of four or five students to examine real-life problems, such as the Kansas City hotel skywalk collapse of 1981 that killed 114 people. "We give them a chance to understand what engineering is about while they're taking all this calculus," says Wild. "It's a reason to hang in there."

Tightening entrance requirements has had an effect as well. Admissions decisions now include scores on New York state Regents exams in math, chemistry, and physics, screening out an additional 8 percent of engineering applicants. "Yes, we could take stu dents and their tuition but that 8 percent would almost certainly be in academic difficulty immediately," says Ryan.

Mark Karwan, dean of SEAS, says the school can more than offset the annual cost of $110,000 for the innovative program by retaining just 30 students who might have dropped out of the freshman class of 450 engineering students.

With overwhelmingly positive feedback from students, the effort is being expanded to the sophomore level for the first time. But Wild says that's as far as the program will go. "I don't want it to become a crutch," Wild says. "We're training them to do this themselves. Then it's time to swim."

Linda Creighton is a freelance writer in Arlington, Va.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Sep 2000
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