Director hails $2.5-million student engagement program
More than a year after the program’s launch, USC Connect’s officials say it is beginning to reach students through campus events and class curricula.
The $2.5-million initiative is designed to encourage students from USC Columbia and its regional Lancaster, Sumter, Salkehatchie and Union campuses to seek “beyond the classroom” experiences like internships and community service opportunities and integrate them with their in-class academics.
The program’s executive director, Irma Van Scoy, said the university plans to accomplish those goals with an online database called the “Beyond the Classroom Search,” which it implemented in August. Students can search by keyword, time frame, type of opportunity, campus and department in order to find the experience they are looking for.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in the program,” Van Scoy said. “At first, it was just me, but now we have more support in the office, we’ve been having Student Representative Board meetings since January, and we started this year with Welcome Week.”
Van Scoy said that USC Connect was involved in all of the Welcome Week events this past August. USC Connect also held its own fair featuring faculty representatives from 14 colleges and schools throughout the university as well as staff members from various campus offices, including study abroad and undergraduate research.
“Students were very happy to speak with faculty members about how they can be involved with USC Connect in their major,” Van Scoy said.
The fair also reached out to upperclassmen, according to Adam Mayer,a second-year exercise science student who serves on the Student Representative Board as vice president for faculty outreach.
“I truly feel this year USC Connect is beginning to ‘connect’ more with students,” Mayer said. “By kicking off the year with our ‘Get Connected’ fair, we were able to get our name out there for mostly incoming freshmen, but also upperclassmen.”
USC Connect has also placed a heavy focus on integration into the University 101 curriculum, beginning their first round of presentations this month.
“The students just did their first University 101 presentations recently, and they worked together with graduate assistants on how to properly communicate the USC Connect idea,” Van Scoy said.
The student representatives settled on a hands-on approach; they split University 101 classes into three groups, giving one group popsicle sticks, another popsicle sticks and paper clips and the third popsicle sticks, paperclips and marshmallows. Each group was instructed to build a house with the items provided. After the third group had much more success] than the other two, the representatives connected each set of items to a type of student. The first represented a student who only had in-class experiences, the second represented a student who had in-class and beyond the classroom experiences but did not connect them and the third represented a student who connected in-class and beyond the classroom experiences.
All University 101 instructors will incorporate the principles of USC Connect — Participate, Create, Lead — into their curricula, with a section on USC Connect added to the University 101 instructor’s guide and a chapter on the program added to the University 101 textbook, “Transitions.”
“Instructors who are teaching University 101 are more informed about the program than they have been in the past,” Van Scoy said. “Hopefully we can get students to think about how they can make their years at USC the best for themselves by including the program in University 101.”
Other programs are also integrating USC Connect through online portfolio programs. Students studying art education, library and information sciences and public health will use online portfolios to chronicle their experiences in and outside of the classroom.