eighteen and life

Courtesy of the clever folks at zombiefont.com.

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This post was shared on The Student Affairs Collaborative as a series of reflections on the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day in the middle of the country with skies so blue it hurt your eyes. A student stopped by our office suite early that morning and mentioned a plane crash in New York City. We pulled out a small television we kept in the office to see what news we could find. As it turned out, that 4-inch Sony was the only TV in our building that day. Many of my colleagues spent hours gathered around my desk as we attempted to make sense of what was occurring.

I watched Katie Couric speaking with NBC Pentagon correspondent, Jim Miklaszewski, when he paused and then said a large explosion had just rocked the Pentagon. It was 9:37 EDT. Karen Kincaid died in that crash of American Airlines Flight 77. She graduated from my high school a few years before me. Everyone who met Karen said she was the nicest person they ever knew.

My husband worked on campus and we were in constant phone contact sharing online information. U.S. news sites were bogged down with web traffic, so we found most of our information from the BBC website. I called my parents in Colorado. It was still early there, so my dad was a bit foggy when answering the phone. It took a bit to convince him to turn on the television. When I reached my sister, she shared that my brother-in-law was currently on a flight to Denver. It was several hours before we could confirm his arrival. His return flight became a fight for the last available rental car and a long drive home.

I kept busy checking on students on internship or exchange along the east coast. One student was interning with a firm just 25 blocks from the World Trade Center and had been at a meeting only 6 blocks away at the time of attacks. Another student, like Valerie, was enrolled at William Paterson with a clear view of the Twin Towers as they collapsed.  A third, enrolled at another campus in New Jersey, canceled exchange, packed her car and returned home within a day.

Although not much work was completed, we remained at the office through the day. Around 4:00 p.m., word began circulating that there was a gasoline shortage in town. My husband and I decided to head out a bit early to pick up our 2 ½ year old daughter from her childcare, just a mile west of campus. As we approached the main thoroughfare though town, traffic was at a stand still in all directions. Cars filled every intersection. We backtracked and cut through parking lots, seeking an open street. After several blocks of thwarted attempts, my panic level was reaching epic proportions. We could not cross the highway.

I had worked all day to make certain my students were present and accounted for. It never occurred to me that I would not be able to get to my own child a mile away.  And there it was, that work/life balance that so frequently challenges us in student affairs, smacking me in the face. Yet this time, it was accompanied by fear like I had never felt. A fear so strong I can feel it now; the fear that I could not protect my child.

Of course we eventually navigated around town, and within a few days, life returned to something resembling normal in our university community. But we knew that every other person in the country was to trying to make sense of it, just like we were.

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Happy Second Anniversary to the eighteen and life blog! Traditional anniversary gifts of china or cotton are now being accepted. Or not.

Thanks for your encouragement. And thanks for sticking around and reading.

A countdown of your top-5 favorite posts of the last year:

5. Gridiron Challenge and Support

4. Laws of Physics and College Transition

3. (Go to) Class Investment

2. Happy Anniversary #SACHAT

1. Digital Storytelling: Adventures in the First-Year Experience

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Mondays being what they are, I found a bit of inspiration today in these wise words from Louisa May Alcott.

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First-year programming on most campuses originated from the topic of retention of students to the second year of college and persistence to graduation. Specific reasons are related to resources and the direct relationship between retention to enrollment and institutional income. With that in mind, most first-year program mission statements are framed around increasing academic performance and retention. Ball State, University of South Carolina, and Appalachian State are among those recognized as Institutions of Excellence in the First College Year. Their first-year program mission statements reflect this retention theme.

Ball State University’s Freshman Connections mission is to accelerate the process for new students to learn and succeed at Ball State. The program “seeks to deepen the contact new students have with faculty, staff, and fellow students in order to improve learning and persistence to graduation”. Fostering academic success, helping students to discover and connect with the university, and preparing student for responsible lives are the tenets of the University of South Carolina’s first-year learning outcomes. They fall under the overarching goal of helping new students make a successful transition, both academically and personally. Appalachian State’s Watauga Community is “structured to develop students’ expertise in the skills to evaluate and integrate relevant and quality information from different knowledge sources through individual and collaborative processes”. With focuses on connections and building community membership, each of these first-year mission goals strives to enhance retention and promote student success.

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As the first-year college experience is a lot of the discussion here at eighteen and life, I thought you may appreciate a little historical reference.

College orientation, or programming focused on the student adjustment to the new academic environment, is recognized as the precursor to first-year experience programs. Early programs grouped students by housing and assigned advisers to guide new students in their education quest. Johns Hopkins University had formed a system of faculty advisors by 1877 and Harvard University had a board of freshman advisors on record in 1889 (Gordon, 1989). First-year seminar courses were later added to the early orientation structure to more fully develop the first-year experience. A first-year course initiated at Boston University in 1888 is recognized as one of the first organized orientation courses while the first orientation course for credit originated at Reed College in 1911 (Gordon, 1989). More than 82 first-year courses were available by 1925-26 with topics ranging from adjustment to college, study skills, current events, citizenship, and reflective thinking. A third of all colleges and universities offered these courses in the 1930’s and by 1948 a survey reported that 43% of institutions had required orientation courses in the curriculum (Gordon, 1989).

Faculty objections to course credit for non-academic orientation courses soon led to the downfall in their offering and fewer courses could be found on the college campuses of the middle to latter half of the 20^th century. The political unrest of the 1960’s and early 1970’s resulting in campus demonstrations and protests led to an even wider divide between students and universities. The University of South Carolina is credited with acknowledging this rift and initiating a plan to link students with the university in the first-year. This led to resurgence in the popularity of the first-year seminar and other first-year student programming (Saunders and Romm, 2008). In addition to addressing the needs of new direct from high school students, first-year programs also attended to the “new college student” as students transitioned from individuals of financial means to more adult, first-generation, and less-academically prepared students. Higher education professionals again “sought ways of helping freshmen make the transition from high school or work to the college environment” (Gordon, 1989, p. 188).

Throughout the 1980’s, first-year experience courses and programs grew and evolved as institutions gave consideration to the transition experience of a growing diverse student population. Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt & Associates (2005) reported that many of the DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice) institutions are skilled at guiding transitions for student success in college and frequently require first-year experience courses or provide additional programs and activities that serve this function. First-year programs including summer orientation through seminar courses are now widely ingrained on the college and university campus and are promoted as important retention strategies common in the student transition to college.

Gordon, V. N. (1989). Origins and purposes of the freshman seminar. In M. L. Upcraft, J. N. Gardner, and Associates (Eds.), The freshman year experience: helping students survive and succeed in college. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J. Schuh, J. H., Whitt, E. J., & Associates (2005). Student success in college: creating conditions that matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Saunders, D. F. & Romm, J. (2008). An historical perspective on first-year seminars. In B. F. Tobolowsky & Associates, 2006 National Survey of First-Year Seminar: Continuing innovations in the collegiate curriculum (Monograph No. 51, pp. 1-4). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

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