This is a supplemental section accompanying Dr. Anderson-Rowland’s profile. It provides more detail about Academic Success and Professional Development, the course she developed for S-STEM transfer students.

Not hand-holding, but more than academics

As part of the Academic Success and Professional Development course, students are expected to visit each of their professors during their office hours. They are also required to develop a detailed time management schedule. In this course, I teach Donna O. Johnson’s  “Guaranteed 4.0 Plan” on learning how to learn.Students are instructed on how to write a good resume, we discuss the importance of job interviews, and they learn how to work a career fair from career services staff. They are also given other essential advice such as not taking more than one lab their first semester and not scheduling all of their classes back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All students are encouraged to get involved in other organizations, to engage them in the campus community and keep them from being what we call “P-C-P students.” P-C-P stands for “Parking lot to Classroom to Parking lot.” A lot of the transfer students are traditionally P-C-P students.

Most of the work for the Academic Success and Professional Development course is completed outside the classroom. The course meets every two or three weeks for a total of seven meetings throughout the semester. During the semester, students are required to write a career plan that includes ten years past the bachelor’s degree. The plan must be at least five pages, and there are approximately twenty topics the students must address. They also have to complete an interest/research paper.

All students are required to read Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. From this book, students must pick five things they want to improve about themselves. At the end of the semester, they are required to write a paper which details how they have improved in these five areas. The students maintain a reflective journal to track their progress. If they break their self-imposed rules, there must be a repercussion. Suppose a student has a goal to overcome tardiness. If that student is late for a class meeting, a punishment may be that he or she is responsible for bringing coffee and doughnuts to the next class meeting. Who Moved My Cheese? is another mandatory read for the students.

Currently, I have fifteen graduate students enrolled in the Academic Success and Professional Development course. Some of the graduate students have had this class five or six times. I require graduate students to read an additional book, Women Don’t Ask. In reality, often men don’t ask, either. Since many of these male students will be leaders in the future, I want them to know how to treat their female colleagues and employees. Graduate students are also required to lead two class sessions. One of the sessions is a discussion about the nuts and bolts of graduate school. The other required session the graduate students lead is a panel in which they discuss what graduate school is actually like. This is a favorite meeting for the undergraduate students in the class.

The largest number ever enrolled in the course during a single semester is 179 students. There are several different class meetings the students can attend. My goal is to accommodate as many different schedules as possible. The problem is that we have five different majors, and their schedules are all different. However, I meet with no more than thirty students at a time. I want to keep the class size small.

A lot of networking occurs in the Academic Success and Professional Development course. Networking is crucial for the students. When the transfer students are having trouble in a course, they look around and think everyone else is doing fine. They have a tendency to think maybe they are in the wrong major. However, as they are networking with the other students, they can ask, “What is your biggest challenge?” Then, they will hear responses such as, “I am really having trouble in this course.” Then, someone else will say, “You, too? So am I.” These types of discussions can lead to formation of study groups. Students realize they are not alone in facing various challenges and that all engineering and computer science students doubt their major choice at one time or another. The opportunity to network is one of main benefits of keeping the class size small.

Students who are required to take the course in order to maintain their scholarships have stated, “If I had known what the course was, I certainly would have taken it without any incentives.” There are some students who take the course who are not scholarship recipients. Therefore, the course is not required. Many of these students have stated, “I need this class because it builds me up. It reminds me to keep on keeping on.” They take the course for the encouragement. I tell them, “You must go on to graduate school. You can do it.”

I initially thought that talking to students at the community college about graduate school was a risk. I was afraid it would be a turn off. I thought, “Here I am talking to freshmen and sophomore students at the community college who are maybe considering the big step to a four-year school, and I am talking to them about graduate school.” I have discovered that some of the kids came to ASU because they really appreciated the encouragement and having someone believe they had the potential to succeed in graduate school. They expressed that they have always desired to be urged to go on to graduate school. They thought, maybe they could do it, but maybe they just couldn’t. They needed someone to encourage them. I did just that. I set high expectations and many of the students are exceeding beyond what they ever imagined.