Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - The University of Wisconsin-Platteville's First Year Experience program supplies a variety of ways to help freshmen adjust to college life. FYE is composed of four sections: Introduction to College courses, Seminars for Academic Success, Peer-Assisted Learning and the G.P.A. Recovery Team.

Introduction to College Life is a one-credit class offered to freshman students in the first eight weeks of the semester. Topics connected to all aspects of college living are included in the class. Academic success skills like time management and effective studying methods are discussed, as are personal goals like career explorations and money management. Campus diversity issues, student rights and responsibilities, campus resources and services for students, student engagement, and university and academic policies are also covered. Engineering and biology majors have separate but similar classes that are more specific to their area of study.

FYE also offers a series of over 20 free one-hour seminars throughout the semester designed to help freshmen with their transition to campus, called Seminars for Academic Success. Some faculty find the seminars to be so beneficial to students that they require students in their classes to attend. The topics of the seminars include: using your textbook effectively, maintaining a healthy brain and body, and communicating and interacting successfully with your professors. The seminars are directed by peer mentors, successful undergraduates who discuss details they wish they had known as first-year students. The seminars require no pre-registration and are usually announced in the Intercom. They have often been held in residence halls or in Ottensman Hall and can be requested by resident assistants or by faculty for their classrooms.

The Peer-Assisted Learning Program is also a section of FYE. It is a free, voluntary and student-based program that supplements traditional classroom instruction by having upper-level students provide assistance to other undergrads.

The newest section of FYE is the G.P.A. Recovery Team. It began in 2008 and features a team of academic advisors that reviews transcripts of first-year students with less than a "C" average. The team recommends schedule changes to improve students' G.P.A., such as repeating selected courses, enrolling in different courses to improve specific skills and reducing the number of credits in the upcoming semester. In January of 2009, the team assisted 200 individual students and their academic advisors.

FYE is a very new program. This is its first year with a full-time director, UWP professor of general engineering Joanne Wilson. Linda Bernhardt assists Wilson with the program.

Bernhardt said that the last 20 years of her teaching experience has shown a growing number of programs like FYE because so many students graduate from high school without the basic, necessary skills to do well in college, such as study skills.

"The newer focus of the program is at-risk students," Bernhardt said, "those who drop out after one semester. Our goal is to retain those students."

Bernhardt said that the response from students has been very positive overall. UWP student Devine Nzegwu, a senior majoring in international studies with political science and environmental justice minors, agrees.

"I was on the UWP women's volleyball team as a freshman," Nzegwu said. "I appreciated the talk about budgeting our money. Many of us didn't have jobs; being in a sport is job enough and I learned to work on saving money."

Nzegwu found her experience so helpful that she decided to participate in FYE as an upper-level student. "It feels good helping out other students with advice that I could have used when I started as a freshman," she said. FYE is promoted through the People's Pioneer, advertisements in the Intercom and resident assistant training. "We try to catch everyone coming through freshman registration to let them know about the FYE programs," Bernhardt said.

For more information on UWP's First Year Experience program, contact Wilson at (608) 342-1081 or wilsonj@uwplatt.edu.

Contact: Joanne Wilson, executive director, UWP First Year Experience, (608) 342-1081, wilsonj@uwplatt.edu Written by: Laura Becherer, Office of Public Relations, (608) 342-1194, bechererl@uwplatt.edu