December 2007 Issue

December 2007 Issue

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Lasting Impressions of Austin College

by Dara McCoy

What do you remember about your college days? Many recall the groups or events that brought people together and created interaction: athletics, an exceptional or challenging course, Greek life, theatre, or student organizations. For Austin College students or alumni, that question is easy to answer. Most would include Communication/Inquiry (C/I) and January Term as some of the most memorable moments of their college years. So, what makes these two programs so important to an Austin College education?

uring fall 2007, the Austin College equivalent of a freshman seminar course, Communication/Inquiry, more commonly called C/I, celebrated its 35th anniversary.

Freshman seminar courses have gained popularity at higher education institutions as a more comprehensive form of student orientation. These courses often emphasize developing studying, writing, and other types of skills necessary for college success.

Austin College’s version of the freshman seminar, implemented in 1972, came long before the idea became popular, and stands out from the crowd because of its unique approach. C/I was born out of the ’60s and ’70s when higher education was moving into a less rigid, “free flowing” vision of education, under the guidance of Austin College leaders like President John D. Moseley and Jerry Lincecum of the English faculty, said Mike Imhoff, vice president for Academic Affairs. C/I focused on critical inquiry or thinking, communication development, other academic skills to ensure students’ success, and the individual development of students, Imhoff said. “Students had this introduction to college through C/I,” he said. “Hopefully, by the end of the course they had good orientation, knew how to get things done at the school, knew what was expected in terms of writing, and were prepared to be successful in college.”

At the time, Austin College’s academic calendar was different than the current 14-week fall and spring terms with a four-week January Term in between. While the spring term remained a traditional 14-week period, the fall term was broken up into two, seven-week terms with the idea students would be “focused intensely in two subjects” each seven weeks, Imhoff said. C/I occupied one of the two courses in the first seven weeks. That new academic calendar structure didn’t last long (reverting in the mid to late ’70s to the traditional calendar the College has today), but C/I remained.

Not Your Average Freshman Seminar

Besides the calendar structure and more flexibility in the courses faculty can offer during C/I, very little has changed in 35 years. “This is a big part of Austin College, this freshman seminar,” said Bart Dredge, associate professor of sociology and director of C/I. “A lot of schools, if not most schools, have some version of freshman seminar, but we do it in a way that is genuinely unique and valuable.” Instead of the freshman seminar having specific courses on writing college papers or note-taking, Austin College freshmen choose from a list of in-depth courses in various academic fields and based on the interests or specialization of each instructor. “The subject matter becomes a kind of vehicle for finding out how well students do this kind of writing, how well they take essay tests, how well they take notes, or how well they synthesize material,” said Carol Daeley, an English professor who has been at Austin College for 32 years, mentoring hundreds of students she taught in C/I courses.

C/I also aims to familiarize students with important resources on the campus, such as the library, Career Services, computer technology, and academic services. Each C/I course has a faculty instructor and three to four Austin College student C/I leaders. “I think one of the strongest parts of the C/I program is in the first few weeks, when many new students are away from home for the first time, they have these sophomores, juniors, and seniors work with them right off the bat,” Dredge said. The student leaders may provide input as first-time students decide between courses, help acquaint the freshmen with the campus or town, and assist in C/I group discussion and other activities to welcome the freshmen and make their first impression of Austin College a good one, Dredge said. 

More Than an Academic Adviser

Austin College’s C/I course also is set apart from other freshman seminars in that the faculty member teaching the C/I course also serves as mentor and academic adviser to the 20 or so freshmen in the class for their entire four years at the College. Instead of having an academic adviser that students see once each semester to get a perfunctory signature for course registration, Austin College stresses a student-mentor relationship that offers “guidance on the kind of academic, intellectual maturation process” students may undergo at college, Imhoff said.

“I wouldn’t want to ever pretend that Austin College has some secret recipe for making a faculty member into a mentor as opposed to an academic adviser, but it is encouraged here strongly,” Daeley said. “I don’t suppose there’s an academic institution in the entire United States that doesn’t claim to give students personal attention and that teaching is more important than research, but mostly, it’s not true. We at Austin College do try very, very hard to be more true to that claim.”

Without forcing the issue, faculty members try to develop relationships with their C/I students simply by being accessible to them. Whether students discuss course selection, career ambitions, academic struggles, personal problems, philosophical thoughts on life, or simply “vent about people in a department who drive you crazy,” the key is that students know someone is available to them, Imhoff said.

With an enrollment of approximately 1,350 and C/I classes of about 20 students, Austin College’s small size becomes an advantage for mentoring opportunities not feasible at larger institutions. “I figured out in a hurry that I never wanted to teach anywhere that students could come through my class, and I not know what became of them,” Daeley said. “Most faculty here deeply, genuinely want to keep our students from just falling through cracks.” Sometimes closer relationships with professors pay off in simple things like more powerful letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate schools or jobs, Dredge said.

Daeley said she believes students learn better and have lasting impressions of their academic work when they feel their instructor is “personally invested in them and what they’re learning.” Yet, the fact that many Austin College faculty members care about students both personally and academically doesn’t mean they’re coddling students, said Dredge. A high academic standard is required at the College. “We don’t want people to regard us as a sort of custodial institution,” Daeley said. “It’s a tricky line to draw.”

January Term: Lasting Impressions in Only Four Weeks

Can four weeks change your life? When talking about Austin College’s January Term opportunities, they might. “Probably Jan Term is the single course that the most students talk about being a life-changing experience,” Daeley said. Students are required to take January Term courses in three of their four years at Austin College. Students choose from a wide selection of on-campus and off-campus (often international) courses, individualized study, and internships for the term.

Each January, about 300 Austin College students take international study courses; 100 complete internships; and 700 study on campus. “The Jan Term is intensive, experimental, and experiential,” said Truett Cates, German professor and January Term director. “Those three words summarize the College’s philosophy. We hope to show that the regular academic term is just one way of learning and that other modes of learning can provide fresh insight.”

Jan Term was implemented at Austin College in the mid-1970s as part of the institutional project that changed the academic calendar. Like C/I, Jan Term survived though the calendar returned to a traditional format. The term is designed to provide immersion or very intensive educational experiences possible in a focused four-week time frame. “The student who is happiest here is the student who can take the opportunities we offer for really in-depth and personalized study,” Daeley said.

Examples of Jan Term study can range from working on an experiment in a lab for several consecutive hours a day, not possible in the few hours available in a fall or spring course, to studying theatre by attending 15 plays in London and writing essays on each. “The trip provided a tremendous, really robust education,” said Imhoff, who tagged along on the London theatre Jan Term in 2006. “I would stack it up against any other course.”

Students are encouraged to take Jan Term courses outside their major to broaden their horizons. Daeley said she remembered leading a Jan Term course to China with Jackie Moore, professor of history, where one student admitted to being scared of the trip. “The young man had never been out of the United States; in fact, I don’t think he’d been much out of Texas,” Daeley said. “But he went, and he had a wonderful time and hasn’t stopped traveling since.”

An Undergraduate Education’s Staying Power

C/I and Jan Term are invaluable components of the education and experience a student receives at Austin College. Knowing professors as mentors and individuals rather than simply as course instructors, and experiencing a subject rather than just reading about it, make these programs personal and memorable. Relationships that endure for decades often are born out of these programs.

“There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from alumni,” Daeley said. “Sometimes, it is somebody who graduated last year, and sometimes it is somebody who graduated in 1978.”

These programs have lasting impacts on students that go well beyond their collegiate careers. It’s the difference between memorizing names, dates, and battles of World War I and actually walking the battlefields. “Students who come to a college like Austin College have a better chance of remembering years later what they actually did when they were in college,” Daeley said.

A LOOK INTO JAN TERM 2008

Sample On-Campus Courses:

• “Mythbusting: You Can Do It Too”— Throughout this course students will conduct and design specific experiments to (dis)prove a notion, a myth, an observation, or an hypothesis. We will analyze the MythBuster series and look at other commonly held societal perceptions. Laboratory work will be a major component of the course.

• “What Kind of Career Shape Are You In?”— This course is designed to help students devise a personalized career fitness plan. Incorporating up-to-date information on the world of work, we will give attention to how the student’s sense of purpose, vision, values, interests, personality, and skills are compatible with different career fields.

Sample Travel Courses:

• “Pharaohs, Pyramids, and Mosques: Exploring Ancient and Modern Egypt”

• “Katrina Re-Build” (Gulf Coast)

• “Learning Spanish in Guatemala”

• “Australia: Scientific and Cultural Perspectives of Nature”

• Full list of Fall Term 2007 Communication/Inquiry courses

• All January Term 2008 course listings (pdf format)

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