If you’ve noticed more young students than normal on campus this morning, you’re right. You haven’t mysteriously woken up in September. These students are likely participating in Jump Start. About 3,200 students moved into dorms on Saturday. More will will be turning up today. They will all be very busy this week.
This year close to 4,300 first year UBC-V students are participating in Jump Start (about 2/3rds in residence, the others commuting). I met with Janet Mee (Managing Director of Student Affairs) and Justin Lieu (Associate Director, First Year Experience and Student Engagement) earlier in August to learn about the current program. We sat on the patio at the Loafe Cafe in the Alumni Building. They spoke with evident pride in this large scale pre-term orientation program.
Jump Start is a first-year transition program for all first year direct entry students. UBC's multi-day orientation is designed to introduce students to university life and resources, their faculty, and new friends. The orientation program runs the week prior to the beginning of classes, providing students with a seamless transition to UBC before their first class begins.
Jump Start has a $75 program fee and, for students staying in residence, an additional $399 for meals and housing during Jump Start. Ensuring all students who are interested have the ability to participate is this program is a critical consideration for the team. This year a low barrier subsidy was set up for students who couldn’t afford the full cost. According to Justin about 700 students opted for the subsidy and received a 50% meals and housing cost reduction.
“It’s about a sense of belonging,” Janet said. “It’s about forming communities, building connections that support academic success,” Justin added. There are 324 student leaders, about 87 faculty members, and a dozen UBC staff devoted to making this community work. First and foremost Jump Start is about laying the ground work for a strong, connected, student experience. This contributes to student retention and paves the way for academic success.
Mark MacLean, program academic director 2011-2017 took Jump Start through its first major expansion as the program moved from less than a hundred students to almost all first year International and Aboriginal students. He was also at the helm for the start of the expansion to include all first year domestic students. I met with Mark at the Old Barn Community Center early last week to learn more about the beginnings of Jump Start and a hands on faculty view of what made the program so effective.
I’ve know Mark for many years (having served at the same time on the UBC Faculty Association Executive). I was also a Jump Start faculty fellow from 2012-2014 during Mark’s term as Academic Director (when I was involved with Jump Start it was a two week, preterm program with monthly meetings with students for the following year). Mark is currently serving as an elected faculty governor on UBC’s Board of Governors.
The program began under a differnt name in Engineering, ASSIST. Mark explained that the faculty there had noted a serious problem with International student retention, it was significantly lower than domestic student retention. The faculty (including folks from English and Commerce), in conjunction with staff from Student Affairs, took a deep dive into the problem. The remedy was a month long program before term that sensitized incoming students to the culture of the engineering school, created effective social support networks for students who had travelled a long way to get to UBC and now found themselves in a strange place with no friends, and introduced these students to faculty in hands-on low risk learning experiences. The model worked.
Mark describe how, in his first year in the position, Janet Teasdale (then Senior Director, Student Development), invited him to join her at a high level UBC Admin meeting. Mark had been asked by Janet the year before to co-chair the steering committee for Jump Start “I had no clue what it was at the time,” Mark said. He did, however, have a lot of experience with working with first year students having been one of the founding faculty behind Science One.
Deans, VP’s, all the decisions makers were at the meeting. Janet led with a presentation of the program and the data they had on improving international student retention. She asked Mark to say a few words. Before he knew it the program was funded to expand. Mark went from co-chair of the steering committee to Academic Director. His assigned objective was to bring the program to all first year International and Aboriginal Students for the summer of 2012.
I was among several dozen ‘faculty fellows’ recruited for the expansion. Having taught introductory anthropology for many years I found the idea of working with incoming students an enjoyable challenge. We were asked to prepare a five session mini-course that demonstrated real classroom activities and mirrored some of the learning approaches students would face. The work wasn’t marked, but students were expected to do it. In the year following faculty fellows would meet with students from our small groups a couple times a term and the students would meet monthly (many of course interacted informally more often).
Many of the students I met over the three years I taught in Jump Start maintained contact with me through to the completion of their studies. My observations of the program mirrored the empirical data: students who were in Jump Start managed to navigate the adult world of university decision making more effectively than those who didn’t have that experience.
People like Mark and Janet, working with a host of other faculty, staff, and student participants built UBC’s first year transition program into something that provides an opportunity now to most of the incoming class. Today it’s shorter than it originally was, a bit more intense, and a little less academic. Programs like Jump Start do a lot to help first time university students stay the course and complete their studies. It helps to establish new networks and connections that have been found essential to navigating the adult world beyond one’s parents home and high school culture.
As you walk about campus this week seeing clumps of young folk moving with purpose around campus you now know what brought them here a full week before the real term begins.