Metamorphosis: freshman to successful student

A majority of incoming freshmen are ill-equipped for the level of academic achievement expected of them by college faculty. A philosophy is forming among the faculty involved in AE101 that the first semester of the freshman year should be dedicated, in a focused and orchestrated way across all freshmen courses, to teaching freshmen first how to be successful students, with the remainder of their college program concentrated on their education and the development of a lifetime of learning. AE101, a course originally intended to introduce freshmen Aerospace Engineering students to topics of their program and to elements of their chosen profession has evolved into an ensemble of activities, actions, plans and intrusive interventions into the college freshmen´s life. Attempts to help entering freshmen adjust to college life have uncovered some surprising insights into multifarious problems today´s freshmen often encounter: They have produced a preliminary diagnosis of a major problem many of the students have, and have had unexpected byproducts in synthesizing teaching effectiveness discussions across previous departmental barriers and in reducing parochial interests. The net effect has faculty pro-actively working as a team to find new solutions to an old problem: changing freshmen into successful students. The scope of this introductory course has changed in many aspects, from introducing fundamental topics to dealing with the deaths of loved ones in the students´ lives, from classical college lectures to group discussions of personal problems and from taking class attendance to physically tracking down absent students in order to determine the causes of their absence. Involvement in the program has increased faculty awareness of a host of previously unrecognized obstacles in the freshman year; and hopefully started faculty on the track to getting freshmen past them and on to academic success