I was thrown in – sink or swim. And for the first few years, I sunk. Deep.
I was a smart kid who found himself lost from the start. Away from home for the first time, confronting academic work I could no longer coast through and dealing with a new social universe proved too much for me in my early undergrad years. I needed help. But the words ‘student experience’ had yet to enter the lexicon.
Given I enroled in university in post-Boomer years, right as that generation started to question continued postsecondary investment, few services were tailored toward students like me. Forget student success or development centres, students were on their own – sink or swim, as I said.
Thanks to shear stubbornness, I stayed afloat, but not without struggle.
Funny, those early failures at university are etched into my memory – still a little painful, still quite embarrassing. To be honest, those parts of my undergrad days have stuck with me more than any class where I succeeded.
They are lessons from which I have built who I am today.
I was taken back to those days this week when I sat down with Kinesiology professor Kevin Wamsley, Health Sciences associate dean (academic programs), to discuss Western 1010.
Rolling out this fall, this universitywide pilot program is designed to provide all first-year students with a head start in transitioning to university life via a series of online tutorials. At its core, the program looks to take the ‘I wish I knew that then’ out of the equation for students.
Let’s just say I know a guy 25 years ago who could have used that.
Western’s program developed as an answer to a generation of students in trouble.
“Something has happened to this generation and we’re a part of it. As parents, we have done everything for our children,” Wamsley said. “On the academic side, on the services side, they have been watching this for a decade. In the last five or six years, they have really seen it come to roost. Students are stressed out and their parents are not there to do things for them. We find that so many of them are lost.”
This generation gets a bad rap. While some of it is deserved (please, cut it out with the selfies), many of the struggles they face today are the same my generation encountered. Sure, the root causes may be different, and we would never have described ourselves as ‘stressed,’ but the needs of the students are the same.
This generation, however, has the clout to get something done about it.
And good for them.
This generation of postsecondary students demands a lot of us as an institution. No news there. They expect a lot from themselves personally – as well as from those who teach and support them. They view education far more as a transaction than previous generations and, as such, expect certain assistance and outcomes.
You can argue the merits all day, however it doesn’t change the facts on the ground.
On the plus side, this generation values a university education far more than mine did, and, in fact, supports us at levels not seen since the Boomers took to campus. They want what we have to offer, so why not make the transition a little bit easier?
Maybe we’re simply refueling the helicopter, but this is the challenge facing faculty and staff today. We haven’t exactly created a monster in this generation. But we have created something far different than ourselves and, as such, need to learn to handle it in a far different way than in the past.
That’s where innovations like Western 1010 come into play.
A lost generation serves no one. And this looks to be one tool to point the way.