2022 Cohort
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Methods: Create pre-college level courses. It is challenging to put into place extra courses - most colleges already suffer from the lack of faculty to teach required classes. Therefore, I propose that Swarthmore provide pre-college level courses that students can take remotely. This can be in the form of subscriptions to online courses or in-person evening classes led by upperclassmen. For the online courses, students can opt into taking them over the break before the main course. During the semester, the in-person evening classes help provide additional support for struggling students. A lot of pre-class materials are usually trivial, like navigating a tool, refreshing on learned concepts, etc. Therefore, these pre-college courses will not be too much of a burden on students, and won’t be counted as credits.
Stakeholders: The STEM faculty, Registrar, and students (upperclassmen as teachers, and underclassmen as students). <span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color:#ffffe0;">Strategic Priority #8.3 (Ari Mosqueda 2022): Resource Navigation for FLI Students</span></span></span> Swarthmore College has a plethora of resources for students ranging from academics to funding to career and life after college. These include Career Services, the Writing Associates Program, Academic Advisers, Student Academic Mentors, as well as more concrete resources such as the Center for Innovation and Leadership summer funding that allows students to find internships of interest to them without worrying about other costs, as well as the Lang Center’s summer funding opportunities. However, with so many resources available to students, it is often difficult to decipher which of these resources are most effective and helpful. Moreover, navigating the large amount of resources available can be more overwhelming and difficult for First-Generation and Low-Income students, and often these resources are hidden behind the multiple pages and tabs of Swarthmore’s website or even in the hundreds of emails that are sent out weekly. A proposed solution could be to create a more centralized resource site based on student experience in order to expand current students’ knowledge on resources available. Additionally, knowing and understanding how students are already able to navigate the resources on campus would be helpful in moving forward on how to make resources more accessible to all students. The stakeholders for this project would include the Swat FLI staff (Dean Karen Henry, Jasmine Owens, and Rosemary Tourish), as well as the head staff from the academic and career support programs such as Career Services and Academic Advising. Student feedback from both those who have felt they have adequately navigated Swarthmore’s resources, as well as those who felt they haven’t, would also be extremely important to this project. A constraint of this project could arise in measuring how well resources are being used, but ultimately qualitative feedback from surveys (about students’ experiences) could help us overcome this obstacle.
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