Navigating university life can be difficult for anyone, but especially for first-generation college students. What can institutions do to help? UT Tyler’s Colleen Swain, Ph.D., associate provost for Academic Success and dean of Undergraduate Studies, knows firsthand. She shares insider details about UT Tyler’s unique program, “I’m First,” which is designed to bridge the gap for first-gen students stepping onto a college campus for the first time.
Swain discusses the university’s record-breaking growth and how administrators, faculty and staff work to ensure every student, particularly first-year students, don’t just start but also finish their academic journey. She talks about innovative strategies being employed, like lingo-decoding sessions, dedicated support communities, monthly checklists and student-led organizations to help students and their families.
MIKE LANDESS: Fall 2023 marked a record-breaking enrollment at UT Tyler, with the largest freshman class in school history. More than 1,300 of the nearly 9,800 students were freshmen, a 14% increase over 2022. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio. What will it take to keep those students all the way through graduation? Colleen Swain is associate provost for Academic Success and dean of Undergraduate Studies, and she’s our guest today. Welcome.
COLLEEN SWAIN: Well, thank you so much, Mike, for having me here today and to be able to talk about our wonderful students here at UT Tyler.
LANDESS: Well now, UT Tyler is obviously doing a great job in attracting freshmen and getting more transfers into the programs, but what does it take to keep them?
SWAIN: There are many factors that go into retaining our students, and those involve things like finance, scholarships, advising, but also the programming and supports that we provide different kinds of students.
LANDESS: Now, what is “first-gen initiative”? I saw that in an article about you, but I didn’t understand exactly how it worked, and I thought you might explain that for us.
SWAIN: Absolutely. First-generation students are those who come to UT Tyler, and neither of their parents have earned a bachelor’s degree, and that’s actually a large percentage of our undergraduate population. For our 2022 cohort of undergraduate students who graduated, 55% of them were first-generation students. And that’s actually a really important thing for us to consider, because think about when you go to something for the very first time-a sporting event or you’ve never flown before. There’s a lot of anxiety about what to do and “how do I act?” We call that in academia “a cultural capital,” that you know the language and how to behave and how to act and all the things surrounding what you’re talking about. Well, first-generation students may not have anyone to ask those important questions to, and so we have first-generation programming for our students here at UT Tyler.
LANDESS: And what does that mean, exactly? What are they? What’s involved in it?
SWAIN: Well, that’s a great question, and we approach it from several different ways. In Academic Success, which is one of the areas that I oversee here at UT Tyler, we have programming called “I’m First,” and students self-select to go into that. It’s not required. But we offer students the opportunity to say, hey, let us help you understand how to navigate being in college. In college, we use all kinds of lingo that people don’t understand, even “first-gen.”
LANDESS: I just found out what a cohort was a few weeks ago. So there you go.
SWAIN: There we go, and we use crazy words like “Bursar’s office.” Who knows what that means? And thankfully at UT Tyler, we call it a “cashier’s office,” but still, it’s confusing. So, one of the things that we do is we offer Zoom sessions for students and their parents, even before they come here, on what to expect from college, what to expect from your first week. But we also have this first-generation program where we provide a glossary of “here’s lingo that’s in college.”
LANDESS: Could I get one of those?
SWAIN: Absolutely!
LANDESS: Thank you.
SWAIN: And what it means. Then we also send monthly checklists to students who say, “I’m first gen; I need this extra support.” This is what good students are doing each month, and so each month, they get a checklist.
LANDESS: Nice. You know, I would think such a program would be such a relief for parents who are on the phone with their freshman weekly is that they just want to come home. We had that in our family. Finally, my wife gave in and started saying, “If that’s really what you want to do, I’ll support your decision.” And it was usually a follow up call from our daughter saying, “Oh, all right, I’ll stay.” I’m guessing reverse psychology doesn’t work all the time.
SWAIN: Well, no, it doesn’t, and really that’s again what some of this programming is. We have seminars, we have checklists, we have all kinds of ways to help support and create this community of support for our first-generation students. Sydney Wilson is who oversees this in Academic Success, and she’s wonderful and hosts and, matter of fact, this, our programming gained so much momentum that our students decided we want to create a first-generation student organization, and it is a very healthy one. It’s called “First Generation Patriots.”
LANDESS: Oh, that’s great.
SWAIN: And it’s led by students, and they host various student sessions that really deal with questions they have, and they bring in the speakers who they want to answer those questions. They are also going to be celebrating a weeklong for National First-Generation Student Day, which is Wednesday, Nov. 8. And so that whole week will have exciting opportunities. But you know, the great thing about our programming and the first-generation student organization is that even if you’re not a first-generation student, you are welcome. Because you know we need people who want to mentor and to be advocates. So that is one way we do that. Now to address your daughter’s issue of being homesick, and it’s just all so different. And our expectations of what being an adult and being at college is going to look like, and then sometimes what reality are very different. And so, at UT Tyler, we even have a first-generation living learning community in the residence halls, and again an RA, who is a first generation student, and again Sidney Wilson worked together, and they meet multiple times throughout the month, and there’s monthly expectations for these students.
LANDESS: Mentoring I figured would be a big part of all of this, and it’s nice to see the students are able to mentor each other. Are there any new aspects to your program for this new class, and what kinds of things do you have in mind for the future?
SWAIN: We’re looking at increasing the awareness of the first-generation programming. Even though we push this out through social media or through email, still some students are not aware of that, and their parents and many times parents are great influencers to say, “Hey, I know there’s this experience and organization that you can have, and it’s a great support,” whether you’re a transfer student, a first-generation student, any kind of student. Please know that we’re here at UT Tyler to help find the community that you fit in, so that you can thrive at our university.
LANDESS: Our guest has been Colleen Swain, associate provost for Academic Success and dean of Undergraduate Studies. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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