Orientation Before Orientation: The New Work of First Year Social Network Development
We exist in overlapping, intertwined social networks: family, friends, neighbors, church groups, hobby acquaintances, Christmas card friends, etc., etc. It’s an old human thing, we’ve always been that way. We get emotional well-being from close family and friends. We get growth from topic groups. We need well-being first, then growth, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy. When a […]
Engagement & The Tale of Two Grateful Dead Shirts
As 1,200 students filed into the room for my talk, I planted myself by the front door with a few orientation leaders and we became the informal welcoming crew. We greeted the students with smiles and good morning wishes. I commented on cool or unique clothing I saw as a way to personalize the greeting and make […]
First Year Disorientation: Retention and Community in Higher Education, Part 1
I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at the University of Oregon. In high school, I had an incredible group of friends. I was never the cool guy per se, but I felt appreciated, influential, and comfortable. My first year in Oregon was a social mess. I was lonely and often depressed. In […]
First Year Students as a New Thought – The Learning Institutional “Brain”
Because we speak quite a bit at Swift Kick, and because we work on the new stuff, where abstraction is common, “vision” is everywhere, and hard experience is limited, we love the analogy. We love to ground the new in the schema of the old. This is just what effective teachers do all the time. […]
Conference on the First Year Experience and the Genius of our Community
We often feel really dumb in our work when we repeat the same silly mistakes. This time we wasted four days of work thinking we could come up with the answer on our own instead of asking for advice from the rich pool of knowledge around us. Last week we reached out to our community […]
Red Rover at the National Conference of FYE
Happy to announce that we’ve been accepted to present Red Rover at the National Conference of the First Year Experience in February. It’s a big honor and a critical conversation. Definitely, a challenge is that we had to submit our proposal some time ago. We had hoped to be farther along with case studies, but […]