Mariella Roque/ Staff Writer
Incoming freshmen will now be more likely to graduate on time.
The Graduation Success Initiative is a University-wide resource aimed to help students graduate in a timely manner. The initiative began last fall when Dean Douglas Robertson of Undergraduate Education found that Arizona State University has a student population similar to that of FIU; the difference between the two universities is that ASU has a higher graduation rate.
Following this finding, a team of FIU faculty and administrators flew to Arizona and spent a week studying ASU’s system to determine what parts could be integrated into FIU.
“The provost mandated that this was something we needed to do,” said Director of the Office of Retention and Graduation Success, Consuelo Boronat.
The GSI is composed of Major Maps and My_eAdvisor.
According to the GSI website, gsi.fiu.edu, Major Maps are “semester by semester paths to on-time graduation” both for freshmen and 2-year transfer students.
The plan provides students with information on what classes they should take during specific semesters.
“We are trying to encourage people to graduate in four years because there’s data showing that the sooner someone graduates, the more money they end up making,” Boronat said. “Students who start and graduate in four years make two million dollars on average more than students who never graduate— that’s retirement, a comfortable retirement.”
Maps for part-time students will also be made available next spring, according to Boronat.
In order to account for students taking fewer classes a semester, maps for part-time students will map graduation to five years, instead of four.
Boronat shared that students who begin their first year part-time have a 10 percent graduation rate during their first year.
“I find it heart-breaking,” Boronat said. “That’s very, very low… I think people get discouraged because it takes too long.”
Maps for students who have not chosen a major are called exploratory maps.
These maps are divided into six general tracks: physical sciences and engineering; biological and environmental sciences; nursing and health sciences; global and social sciences; humanities and arts; and administration and management. These maps are intended to allow students to take general classes that apply to all majors within that track for a year and, if the students choose a major within the same area, they will still be able to graduate on time once they declare a major.
To aid students with deciding on a major, the University has opened a class called Discover Your Major, SLS 1402. According to Boronat, the course involves self-exploration and career-exploration, which allows students to consider the majors tied to certain careers.
Freshman in Asian studies, Stephanie Montes de Oca, said she likes the major maps.
“They give me an idea of what classes I should take and when.”
The major maps lay out the classes they should take every semester, enabling students to take classes when they need to take them.
“If we’re putting the classes on the map, the departments have to offer them,” Boronat said. “So what we’re moving toward is using these schedules to do course planning.”
Enrollment planning allows the University to foresee how many sections each college will need to provide based on the amount of students that are projected to register for a specific course.
According to Boronat, the departments will be able to have enough sections available to ensure that students will be able to register for every course they need, as long as the students follow the department’s map.
The second part of the GSI is called My_eAdvisor, an electronic advisor embedded in PantherSoft that allows both the student and the advisor to remain up-to-date as to how far along the student is in regards to their target graduation.
Through My_eAdvisor, students will be assigned an advisor and will have the opportunity to send direct messages to the advisor via the system.
“It will be as helpful as the major maps because I’ll be able to graduate on time,” said freshman in computer engineering, Isabella Zengotita. “If I didn’t have it, I might overlook some requirements.”
Students will also be able to view advisor notes online from a past session of advising and will be able to schedule an appointment with the advisor. My_eAdvisor enables students to select their classes for their upcoming semester directly, instead of searching for them through lists.
“It’s going to help people from falling through the cracks. The resources are out there, but somehow students manage to overlook things,” said Assistant Director of the Office of Retention and Graduation Success Arlene Garcia. With critical indicators, “there isn’t going to be any forgetting,” Garcia said.
These critical indicators, alerts that will appear on the dashboard of a student’s PantherSoft account, are aimed to keep students informed at all times. They are triggered by a number of indicators, including a low GPA, a failing or low grade in an important class for that major or a course a student should be enrolled in, but isn’t.
“What we found was that there are some courses that are more important than others— that predict when students are going to graduate,” Boronat said.
“It’s going to limit the aspect of surprise,” Garcia said. “If there’s a sequence of classes that are all prerequisites to each other, then we’re going through them so that [the students] don’t miss the sequence.”
My_eAdvisor is set to go live in September, as per Miguel Sahagun, assistant director of academic advising technology, one of the teams that has been building the site.
“We update the major maps on an ongoing basis,” Boronat said. “We are going to be building major maps into eternity because every year we’re going to build a new set of major maps that will reflect changes in requirements.”
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