The Office of Undergraduate Education hosted the annual Student Success Launch to plan initiatives aimed at improving student life and promoting victories for MSU students.
As the new year began, campus was bustling with students old and new as faculty and staff prepared for their classes this semester. With the new year came a familiar yet ever important goal: promoting student success. The Office of Undergraduate Education held the Student Success Launch to hear from students, faculty and community members in an effort to plan initiatives aimed at supporting students academically and beyond.
Amy Martin, assistant dean for Student Success Strategy in the Office of Undergraduate Education, reflected on the journey to the Student Success Launch. The program began over 10 years ago and has grown every year since.
“We have been engaging in this activity for over a decade, and the teams that originally started it were out of the neighborhoods,” Martin said. “When the neighborhoods were formed on campus, there was a small group of leaders who were trying to think about student success for undergraduate students and work across the campus. They were a small but mighty group, and they started with holding a summit about student data in the summer and then eventually we picked up on having a kickoff in the fall to get us oriented and ready for the work for the year.”
The goals of the summit centered around five opportunity areas. These were self-discovery of purpose, educational success, developing a sense of belonging, contributing to an empowered community and developing well-being.
“Those are areas that the published research tells us that if you can hit all of them in supporting students in a fulsome way, that students are very, very successful,” said Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education Mark Largent. “So, they overlap. The idea is that if you're weak in one area, it impacts the ability of students to be successful in another. We know that collectively these five areas represent the breadth of our students' needs.”
In order to tackle barriers faced by students in these five areas, the Student Success Launch focused on amplifying student perspectives. The University Innovation Alliance Fellow and Undergraduate Student Success Strategic Initiatives Manager Maria O’Connell recognized the importance of hearing from students themselves.
“[Student involvement is] very purposeful,” O’Connell said. “This year we really wanted to center the student voice and experiences. Sometimes we can get lost in our day-to-day lives and lose sight of what our work is at the institution, but how are the students perceiving this work? What are their lived experiences? [This helps us] better learn and make sure that the initiatives are supporting students’ needs, not the institutional needs.”
The Student Success Launch brought together people from all corners of the university and community to figure out the best ways to help students through adversities. Leaders wanted to have something tangible to give to the student population, so they aimed to create goals for student success to be reached by 2030. Through this event and other work like it, the Office of Undergraduate Education hoped to support students throughout their college careers.
The Red Cedar Log is the official yearbook of Michigan State University, established in 1889. The award-winning publication is produced and distributed by students on the RCL staff —students with passions rooted in writing, editing, design, photography and business. Every year, their talents and the stories on MSU’s campus culminate in a collection of Spartan history.
