Binghamton enhances the first-year experience

Juggling the responsibilities of academic life can feel like one ball too many — and yet Tyler Lenga is dedicating the fall semester to teaching first-year students how to do just that. He might pick up the actual art of juggling while he’s at it, too.

Lenga, MPA ’12, is the assistant director for First Year Success. As part of his Binghamton University position, he’s in charge of the Speaking Center and the Emerging Leaders Program, helping students strengthen their public speaking and leadership skills. He is also co-teaching Juggling: An Introduction, with Jeanette Patterson, an associate professor of romance languages and literatures, as part of a set of classes known collectively as UNIV 101, or First Year Experience (FYE) courses.

“She has a juggling background,” Lenga says of Patterson. “And she’s trained and has experience in the health benefits of juggling, the science that goes behind juggling and is going to be exposing all this to students. I’m just as eager to learn!”

First Year Experience courses are mainly fall classes organized in collaboration with the office of Student Transition and Success and Harpur College, for incoming first-semester, first-year students. They are co-taught by a faculty member from Harpur and a professional staff member. These two-credit seminar classes split their content between an academic topic taught by the faculty member, and a new student transition subject such as best practices for research, taught by the staff member — which will fall under Lenga’s purview. Each class is typically capped at 20 students to help the students connect.

Kelli Smith, the assistant vice president for student success, believes the more students that take UNIV classes early on, “the more successful students we are going to have.”

“One of the things I absolutely love about this institution is that there is a really strong focus on making sure our undergraduate students are successful. It’s reflected in our strategic plan and the Road Map,” Smith says. “Sometimes it’s hard for new students to know how to navigate all the many resources we offer. The magic of these classes is that they front-load that knowledge, and ensure that the students proactively know about those resources early on.”

Although similar classes were once only offered to Harpur College students, the FYE program is open to all. Last year, a few sections were even offered in the spring, so transfer students had a chance to attend them as well. After a successful pilot last year, which Smith says led to a 22% enrollment increase and much excitement from parents, students will even have access to a success team featuring trained peers.

“If we pair a student up with a peer early on, before they even set foot on campus, then the student knows that this person is a go-to for them for questions, and not only during the class, but their whole first year,” Smith says.

Keys to student success

Megan Konstantakos, a senior assistant director of Harpur Edge, co-teaches History of the National Parks, where she focuses on student affairs and the transitional topics for student success, even outside the classroom.

“I think of it as an extension of orientation,” Konstantakos says. “This gives an opportunity to reinforce a lot of the resources on campus. I try to plan it in a way where it’s what a student would need at a certain point of the semester. We usually start off by really getting to know the class and getting to build relationships … but then we dive into things like time management with the office of Student Transition and Success, working with the Fleishman Career Center on individual strengths and what it looks like to work with a career center over the next four years.”

Konstantakos uses her experience at Harpur Edge (which provides Harpur College students with programming to improve their professional, intellectual and interpersonal skills) to link students to opportunities that will strengthen their connection to campus, other professionals and ultimately each other. For example, Konstantakos says she will often have students complete a “friendship speed-dating” game, and help them access networking events, skill certifications and one-on-one appointments tailored to a student’s need.

Konstantakos believes that the UNIV classes are a great chance for students to take a break from the stress of the sudden change in their lives, and learn to balance academia with identity.

“When they’re taking the ‘chems’ and the ‘bios,’ they’re hard classes to get thrown into,” she says. “It’s a nice time to come together as a small group, talk about something you’re all interested in, have friends that you can recognize — probably from your other classes, too — who are in the same room, and then know that they get quality support.”

For Benjamin Andrus ’06, MPA ’08, a faculty librarian, UNIV classes are also a chance to add value to first-year student experiences and create some context for future time on campus. Andrus serves as the second instructor, along with Konstantakos, in History of the National Parks.

Andrus, who has worked with the University since 2011, first started teaching History of the National Parks in fall 2018. But his experience with the parks system, and the desire to share it, began well before then. When he was a student, Andrus says, he was offered a similar opportunity as the undergraduates whom he teaches now, an experience he says “totally changed the trajectory of my life.”

“There’s a lot of people on campus, both faculty and staff members, who have a lot of things to offer in their roles,” Andrus says. “They look forward to the opportunity to extend those things. But it’s a two-way street and you can’t just show up to class and then disappear right afterwards. Going to office hours, making actual connections with your instructors, making sure that they can put a name to a face — and the doors that can open — are really the things that set you apart down the road.”

Andrus also offers students the opportunity to continue their knowledge by going out and seeing it hands-on. Each year, Andrus teaches winter and summer courses through SUNY Broome Community College, composed of a trip to Everglades National Park — the very same course he took as a student — and an array of Western national parks. This year, the class visited Capitol Reef in Utah and Grand Teton and Yellowstone in Wyoming.

Living with a purpose

Other UNIV classes focus on topics closer to home. For Michelle Withers, an associate professor in the Biological Sciences Department, UNIV classes are an opportunity to focus on non-transactional aspects of college.

“You come, you’re going to take some classes, we’ll give you some training, you check your marks at the end, you get a diploma,” Withers says. “But there’s also a transformational part of college, like trying to figure out who you are, what you love, where your strengths are, how that triangulates with something about the world that you want to contribute to. And that part of college, I think it can get played down.”

Withers is also the STEM educator for the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT). Although her background is in neurobiology, her classes since 2017 focus on how to teach more effectively. Instead of topics she covered before her doctorate, such as electrophysiology (recording cells talking to one another), she introduces students to Living a Meaningful Life.

Withers first established the class with the help of a graduate student, who originally discussed some of the essential topics in their existing classes: instead of treating students like “receptacles” and focusing on what’s wrong, identify barriers, give back to your community and search for satisfaction outside of the traditional. The demand was soon realized, and the popular UNIV section was established. Withers hopes to help students remove themselves from the academic pressures of college and rediscover what brings them joy.

“College is hard, right? And you’re making hard decisions. I’m not saying it’s all rainbows and unicorns — but it should be some rainbows and unicorns,” Withers says. “You should have that feeling of, ‘I got in, and I’m going to get to go there, and meet people, and take classes and read about things and find out about stuff and see how I’m going to contribute and figure out who I am, and who I want to be and how I want to contribute!’ And I don’t think students feel that.”

An opportunity to explore

While the class content is everchanging, the First Year Experience program maintains that its main purpose is to help students find their stride at the beginning of their college career.

Lenga, a self-proclaimed “first-year advocate,” says he would one day like to see every new Binghamton student go through a UNIV section to learn about campus resources, take away “valuable knowledge” about a unique topic, and incur a little extra “value added” in the form of confidence and connections.

“I’d love to see us, as a university, do as much as we can to support that first-year success,” Lenga says. “I’m always going to encourage students to look at their higher education experience as an opportunity to explore.”