Promoting and Enriching the Student Experience – Going one or two or three extra steps (Oct 2018)

Ensuring students have as rich and engaged an experience as possible while here at Carleton is essential as this has a tremendous impact on retention and graduation rates, academic success, personal student success, and career readiness, among many other areas.

We started by exploring the literature that exists around the student experience, and how that ties to academic and student success.  To achieve our final recommendation, we met with our sponsors and interviewed a number of students. We also conducted an environmental ‘skim’ of current resources available on campus to enrich the student experience. Additionally, we explored the “Working Group on the Undergraduate Student Experience Report” and reports about experiential learning. This enabled us to identify a number of themes and further refine the existing gap which we identified – the need for providing the most relevant information at the optimal time to undergraduate students at all levels of study. This would be a means to increase student awareness for the plethora of Carleton’s excellent resources. Finally a number of actionable strategies are identified which can be easily implemented here at Carleton to promote and enrich the student experience.

•  Jane Fry, Data Services Librarian
• Richard Heron, Staff Sergeant, Department of University Safety
• Richard Lefebvre, Manager, ITS Voice Services
• Joana Rocha, Associate Professor, Dept of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Sarah Sabourin, Manager, Employment and Partnership Development, Career Services
• Jaffer Sheyholislami, Associate Professor and Interim Director, School of Linguistics and Language Studies