FIGs in the Media- Indiana Daily Student 1998
New opportunity opens for freshmen
FIGS supports incoming students
By: Andy Gammill
With a student population of about 36,000 students, IU can be intimidating to incoming freshmen.
The University just got smaller for 400 incoming freshmen.
This group will experience a new program called Freshmen Interest Groups, which will help them adapt to life at a large university. There will be 20 FIGs, an each one will have 20 students who will attend classes together and live in the same residence hall.
The members of the FIGs will be enrolled together in three courses that will meet general requirements such as history and philosophy and a one-credit course to orient them with IU. They will all be housed near each other with the same peer instructor.
The peer instructors are upperclassmen who have succeeded in keeping a high grade point average and are known to excel, said FIGs coordinator Sarah Westfall.
Teaching the one-credit course on study skills and how to use the resources at IU will be the peer instructors’ main job, but they are also there to act as a friend and mentor.
Although the program is experimental, Westfall said she is fairly certain it will work. “The FIGs program is new at IU, but it’s not new at other colleges. What makes it useful is the power of the cohort,” she said. “It lets people come to the University and have a human-scale relationship.”
Associate Dean of Faculties George Kuh, who oversees the program, agreed with Westfall. “It’s important to the student because it creates a small academic community. You’ve immediately got a peer group. You’ve got people to study with, people to walk to class with, people to talk with,” he said.
Although there is a benefit to the student, there is also a benefit for the University – increased retention. The funding for the FIGs program comes directly from a Lilly Grant awarded to increase retention.
The same grant is also funding 11 other programs to boost retention at IU including improvements in the career development programs, the advising program and math sequences.
After other schools have implemented programs similar to FIGs, retention rates increased by as much as 5 or 6 percent.
Westfall said the first college to use this type of program was the University of Oregon, which started its program in 1982. Other universities followed, and IU modeled its program around the University of Missouri-Columbia’s experience with special housing units.
Getting the program in place involved cooperation between numerous departments. Westfall said many academic schools and departments took part in the process as well as nonacademic departments such as the Division of Residential Programs and Services and the Office of the Registrar.
Westfall said she didn’t know if the FIGs program would attract students who had done well in high school and wanted to keep it up or if it would attract students from smaller schools whose parents wanted them in the program.
Junior Franciscus Adam, one of the peer instructors for next year and an international student, said he feels the program will be appealing to international and out-of-state students. “The most helpful part (of the program) is that we are going to expose them to the museum and things we have at IU. We’re also going to help develop friendships,” Adam said. “I’m looking forward to making my own syllabus and putting it into action and also changing how they feel about college.” Sophomore Erica Hall said she is most looking forward to teaching and interacting with the younger students.
For now, the course taught by the peer instructor and the co-enrollment in classes only lasts for one semester. But Westfall and Kuh said they hope to expand the program to include both semesters in the future.
The program is scheduled to get larger each year, and FIGs’ goal is to have 1,000 students involved within the next several years.
Excerpted From: Indiana Daily Student, March 4, 1998
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