The first year of college can be a make-or-break moment for many students. It’s a time filled with excitement and uncertainty. At 51ԹϺ, the First-Year Experience (FYE) program ensures new students transition smoothly into campus life and thrive academically, socially, and personally.
The FYE program is a cornerstone of 51ԹϺ's commitment to student success. Since its launch in spring 2022, the program has become a comprehensive resource hub that connects students to personalized advising, mentoring, engaging orientation sessions, interactive workshops, and more — all designed to help new students integrate with the university community, develop essential skills, and lay a strong foundation for their academic journeys.
Karen Violanti, executive director of the First-Year Success program, says the foundation for FYE originated through the previously established Peer Mentoring program, the First-Year Seminar, and other student programming for first-year students over the years.
“A lot of pieces were already in place, but not a centralized person point of contact to pull it all together and build it into a framework and a network that students from the student-facing side could interact with more seamlessly. So that's where it came from,” Violanti said. “All the research points to the impact of FYE in terms of retention and success and students’ overall sense of belonging and community interactions with peers, interactions with faculty, all those things we know to be true about their retention research. 51ԹϺ saw an opportunity to pull together all those best practices that were already happening into one office.”
FYE’s work is interdisciplinary. Every step of the student's academic journey is impacted through key collaborations with units and departments across campus. Programming is divided into themes such as connect, explore, grow, thrive, and believe to help students personalize their experiences.
“It helps students by providing a road map to navigate the overwhelming number of opportunities available. We encourage students to connect with peers and faculty, explore new interests, grow through self-discovery, and thrive by believing in themselves,” said Lauren Gatto, assistant director of the First-Year Experience program. “This approach aims to reduce decision fatigue and help students personalize their first-year experience. We've created these themes to let the students know to just try to pick something. This is a menu of opportunities for students to choose from that makes sense for them.”
Although the FYE program has existed for a short time, it has already made a significant impact. Students who participate in FYE programming and Peer Mentoring programs demonstrate stronger academic performance compared to their non-participating peers.
For example, fall-to-spring retention rates for FYE and Peer Mentoring participants in the fall 2023 first-time, full-time cohort were 95.3% and 94.8%, respectively, while non-participants had a retention rate of 89.5%. Additionally, FYE and Peer Mentoring participants had cumulative GPAs at the end of the fall 2023 term that were 0.37 and 0.34 points higher than those of non-participants.
To further support retention, FYE awarded 10 FYE Connection Award scholarships, recognizing student engagement. Among the 30 recipients of these awards, the retention rate is 90%.
The future of FYE includes evolving student offerings. The Peer Mentorship program will grow to accommodate more students, the Common Read program will expand on the curricular side, new first-year seminars are in the works, and an FYE-themed floor in the residence hall is launching this fall to have an intentional tie between academic life and residential life for first-year students that are living in the halls.
“We're so excited for what’s next. We just celebrated our second anniversary in February. We have an assistant director now,” Violanti said. “We did not have an assistant director before Lauren so I'm super excited to have her expertise on the team and to have somebody to work with to help build what FYE is going to continue to look like.”
Many of the incoming changes and updates are dictated by student feedback. Gatto said her team makes an effort to take feedback and implement it accordingly to address student needs.
“Everything that we do is informed by what our students are telling us and what we see that they need,” she said.
For more information, visit the First Year Experience website.
