Welcome to the First-Year Experience Pilot Program Web site
The First-Year Experience Pilot Program (FYEP) at Southern Connecticut State University is making history! The FYEP is one of the largest communal movements in Southern history. Faculty, students, staff, parents, and administrators have come together to create and sustain a campus-wide initiative designed to encourage intellectual and creative inquiry, foster community involvement, and lodge life-long learning in the hearts and minds of an entire first-year class, as well as in the hearts and minds of instructors, staff, upper-division students, and administrators who have joined first-year students on this quest.
At the center of the FYEP for all first-time, first-semester students is the notion of learning communities, where cohorts of 20 students move through two or three of their general education courses together, forming connections and friendships with their peers, as well as with the faculty who teach these courses and the staff who supports them. These communities are designed to provide the collaboration necessary to student success at a large state university, where the possibilities for connections are endless, but can sometimes feel overwhelming and difficult to manage at this crucial time of change for students new to university culture.
For some students, the FYEP includes a FYE course -- FYE 101: Introduction to Intellectual and Creative Inquiry and a compostion course. For others, it includes the opportunity to experience "linked" connections between course content in their general education courses. For all students, however, the FYEP offers a historic opportunity to better understand the role of the university and of a liberal* education in their lives.
The FYEP Web site is meant to be a source of information and a point of inquiry for students, parents, faculty, staff, and administrators. Currently the site offers answers to questions about the FYEP, listings of co-curricular SCSU events,workshops, and forums, and information about FYE faculty and the courses they teach. We are still building this site, hoping soon to add resource materials for faculty and students, as well as other features.
So to all of you who have joined the FYEP effort in one way or another, check in soon and often! We are here, and we are ready to help all of you navigate this first-year of the First-Year Experience Program.
*Liberal: a) Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted; b) Free from restraint; free in speech or action; c) Of passage, etc.: Freely permitted, not interfered with; d) Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid: e) Free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favour of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform (adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989).
fye program administration
Academic Director:
Nicole Henderson, Associate Professor of English
Phone: (203) 392-6196
E-mail: hendersonn1@southernct.edu
Student Affairs Coordinator
Denise Bentley-Drobish, Director of Student Life
Phone: (203) 392-5782
E-mail: bentleydrod1@southernct.edu
assistant:
Jan Jones, University Assistant
Phone: (203) 392-6671
E-mail: jonesj37@southernct.edu
office:
Old Student Center, room 107
