Tag: sophomore year

Closing the Gap: Integrating Vocation into Second-Year Initiatives

Many colleges lack support programs for second-year students, leaving them feeling isolated and without direction. Institutions are encouraged to integrate vocational exploration into academic advising and provide tailored support. Initiatives such as high-impact practices, applied learning, cohort events, and mentoring opportunities can enhance social connections and address students’ needs for purpose and career direction during their critical second year.

brown cardboard box with sad face
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

When sophomores return to most colleges after the summer, they often discover less support than they received as first-year students. Half of institutions do not offer second-year initiatives to meet students’ needs. Given the scarcity of time and dollars, some institutions are simply relieved that second-year students have returned and then shift their focus almost exclusively to the newly arrived first-year students.

The absence of second-year programs leaves many students in their second year feeling invisible and isolated. In response, many institutions have embedded second-year initiatives into academic advising, career exploration and planning, early alert systems, leadership programs, and back-to-school events. Sophomore retreats, mentoring, and residence life initiatives have also become popular.

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The Meaning of Dinosaurs: Embedding Vocation in the Major

This project aims to fill the gaps between introductory vocation lessons in the first-year seminar and culminating activities in the senior capstone to offer students the chance to make connections and discern vocation after declaring a major—typically in sophomore- and junior-level courses such as historical methods.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

For Joel, it started with dinosaurs. Reading about them, collecting them as toys, and drawing them stand out among his childhood memories. He filled his wandering map with meaningful moments, including the time a teacher gave him a fossil. Ultimately, a circuitous line connecting one history-related experience after another emerged. As he took stock of 20 years of memories, colorfully scattered across a poster board, he saw a pervasive lifetime love of history that inadvertently led him to his undergraduate major.

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Advising for Vocation: Ten Touchstones

Carter Aikin offers ten touchstones about advising and vocational reflection based on his many years of experience working with NetVUE campuses.

In March 2018, Hannah Schell discussed the great promise and deep challenges of incorporating vocational exploration into the fabric of academic advising. In this current post, I will pick up where she left off. Many of our NetVUE member institutions have seen the potential for vocational reflection in student advising that Schell discusses. Many, too, are exploring effective frameworks for sustaining programs which do this consistently and effectively. Lots of us are trying to figure out how to do this well. Here I want to address both the promises and the challenges of incorporating vocation into student advising by offering a list of touchstones. Continue reading “Advising for Vocation: Ten Touchstones”

Vocation without the “V” word

What do we do when the word “vocation” itself is a problem? Vocation, NetVUE contends, is a powerful lens for undergraduate education. But what’s to be done when our students or our faculty/staff communities don’t much like the word?

For some institutions, an older history with the V-word with a much different meaning proves unhelpful as a platform for new programming. For others, it points to an approach for education which is entirely too theological for the climate of the campus. I work on a campus where care for the student journey of meaning, purpose, and well-being is extremely high. So much so, in fact, that “vocation” stands as one of our General Education Student Learning Outcomes. Our students look to faculty and staff for very holistic formation and we excel in providing it.

And yet, on our campus, if you openly use the word “vocation” or “calling” in a classroom, the conversation stumbles or stagnates. At times, in one-on-one conversations my students may be warm to the notion of a calling, but discussing that with peers in a class setting seems to violate some unspoken social taboo with students at Blackburn College. The V-word just does not fly here. So how do we educate through vocation without the V-word?    Continue reading “Vocation without the “V” word”