Abstract
First year students are randomly selected to participate in the Ensure program, an enhanced first-year Engineering experience, providing participants with weekly strategies for success. They partner with a peer leader, their immediate peers, and an academic advising staff member to develop plans to meet their personal, academic, and professional goals. The entire team works together to evaluate their process so that participants know what to do to achieve and maintain success.
Using electronic systems (campus toolkit, blackboard), staff run workshops, peer leader lead activities as well as various assignments and events, the students learned to manage their own success and gear up towards engaging in a team setting for their project design competition. Come listen about the various factors that fell into place to bring about this enhancement and what our lessons have been on the journey.
Speaker Biography
Emily Nudge
Emily recently joined the Bourns College of Engineering, after many years at Honors. She uses her desire for student growth to foster challenging experiences so that students come away reflecting on their strengths and weaknesses. With a Bachelors’ Degree in Fine Art, Emily firmly believes her creative background assists her in interacting with students and their circumstances.
Tara Brown
With over a decade of service as a Student Affairs Professional, Tara Brown is committed to the day when students no longer need student affairs staff. In the meantime, she is happy to support, advocate, and whip students into the best academic, personal, and professional shape possible. A master’s in Counseling in one hand and the wisdom of the ages in the other, Tara Brown is, as one student notes, “the firm rock of unmoving sarcasm and sass in the storm that is college life”. In her current Earthly form, she is the Assistant Director of the Office of Undergraduate Student Academic Affairs for the Bourns College of Engineering on the University of California, Riverside campus. She is lovingly referred to as “The Oracle” , a character from the Matrix movie trilogies as a result of her uncanny ability to know what students will do before they know they will do it. From quick questions to life pondering sessions, a moment with Tara Brown could be filled with laughter and/or tears, but will always end with a hit of the button and the realization, ‘That was easy’.
