UWI’s 2023 FYE orientation programme gives new students a very warm, and helpful, welcome
Imagine yourself a fresh-faced graduate from secondary school, and now you are here, on the sprawling St Augustine campus, beginning your higher education journey. It can be overwhelming, perhaps even terrifying.
UWI St Augustine’s First Year Experience (FYE) student orientation programme was created to help students in this challenging transition. For the new academic year, 2023/2024, the Division of Student Services and Development (DSSD) has already been hard at work shepherding the latest cohort through campus life.
“Our campus’s FYE programme is designed to facilitate new student orientation and the process of successful transition to university life,” explains Jarell Alder, Manager of Student Engagement at DSSD.”
The response from students this year, he says, has been great:
“Student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive for this year’s FYE cycle, and more importantly, the impact of the programme is seen and felt as student engagement levels are on a steady increase.”
FYE features a combined total of 20-plus initiatives and annual orientation events (both virtual and in-person), together with support resources including a new student orientation guide, a self-paced orientation course, and the FYE YouTube channel that houses content for the benefit of new students.
“Smart Start” is one such initiative, a “pre-orientation" that takes the form of virtual information sessions, held weekly for the month of June. Each week, students get the opportunity to learn about topics such as the registration process, academic advising, student services at UWI St Augustine, and fees and funding opportunities.
Others include campus tours, faculty orientation, UWI Clicks (online tutorial for the campus’s student platform), library tours, a career advice programme, Guild Fest (featured in this issue of UWI TODAY), and many others (for the full list, visit the FYE site at https://sta.uwi.edu/fye/).
As Alder explains, “within the FYE programme are distinct initiatives that meet informational needs, promote social integration and relationship building, and provide instruction on navigating campus platforms.”
DSSD’s student engagement programme is designed using the Gullarhorn W-Curve Transition Model, a model first proposed in 1963 to explain the adjustment to culture shock, and later applied to first year university students. The W-Curve model identifies five phases - the honeymoon phase, culture shock, initial adjustment, mental isolation, and finally acceptance and integration.
“The ultimate aim of the FYE programme is to help students successfully navigate the aforementioned phases of the transition process to higher education,” says Alder.
The programme, he adds, has “evolved from a single orientation event to a dynamic and comprehensive programme that guides intentional engagement with the new student cohort, particularly through their first year of study with us”.
Evolution is one of DSSD’s major themes when it comes to FYE. They intend to keep the programme growing and developing. In 2024, they will launch a new theme for FYE’s next three years.
“Our team at the DSSD,” says Alder, “remains committed to empowering students through the FYE programme, and look forward to continuing our work with campus stakeholders in leveraging FYE to facilitate the highest levels of student success.”
For more information on FYE, visit https://sta.uwi.edu/fye/. For more on the Division of Student Services and Development and the services they offer, go to https://sta.uwi.edu/dssd/.
