Reaching Out to Students

By SUE WUETCHER
News Services Associate Director

Dubbed "Operation Reach Out" by Provost Thomas Headrick, the effort will try to help students deal with any academic or career problems they may have while making them feel that they're part of a community.

"Students sometimes feel that nobody knows their name," said Nicolas Goodman, vice provost for undergraduate education. "We want to make it clear that we do care, we know they're here, we want them to stay and we're interested in helping them get the academic program that they need.

"The essence of undergraduate education is the relationship between students and faculty," Goodman continued. "We need to strengthen that, and that's what we're trying to do with this program."

He noted that due to different cultures within the different departments, it wouldn't be workable to impose a university-wide approach to implementing the program. However, he said, Headrick "very definitely wants to see every undergraduate student who is not graduating contacted."

The initiative is, in part, an attempt by the Provost's Office to respond to what Goodman called a "serious enrollment problem."

"We've got to turn this around," he said. "The way to do it in the short term is in retention (of current students) and continuing to recruit new students."

But in the long term it is hoped that Operation Reach Out will be the foundation on which to "establish these types of relationships between students and their departmental homes," he said.

"We have to produce a university in which there is sufficient contact between faculty and students," he said. "Students need to feel they're in a nurturing environment where they can learn, where people care and where they can get help with their problems."

Most university students are young adults ages 18-22, Goodman pointed out. "These young people need to have a place to go which feels like home, where there are adults who care about them," he said. "We haven't done a good a job, or aren't perceived to have done a good job of that."

The way to turn that around, he stressed, is to "produce a better relationship between students and the programs they intend to major in or are majoring in."

Mark Karwan, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said that Operation Reach Out "re-emphasizes our commitment to the individual studentŠ it's the right thing to do."

Students do not always take advantage of advisement opportunities, Karwan noted. "We'll proactively make contact and show our concern with each student and try to facilitate their program needs," he said.

The program should be "fairly easy to implement" in engineering, since students are given a faculty advisor once they chose a major and faculty already are heavily involved in mentoring students in the Honors Program, he said.

Operation Reach Out is "an extension of the concern that is already shown to students by faculty," said Kerry Grant, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters. It recognizes that those students most in need of help frequently are those who don't seek it out on their own, he said.

"We are really moving against the perception that a large university by its very nature is impersonal," Grant said.