UG Graduation and Student Retention Summit
Our campus held its first Retention and Graduation summit in April 2024. It highlighted “Promising Practices” or activities or initiatives practiced by our faculty and staff that are showing a positive impact on our ability to retain students and ensure their timely graduation.
We received such positive feedback on the event that we are excited to announce our 2nd annual event to continue collaborating on this important topic.
Date: Friday, February 21 at 11:00am-4:00pm
Once again, we are encouraging all faculty and staff to consider submitting a Promising Practice to be featured at the browsing fair. We have prepared a series of FAQs below to offer additional details as you consider sharing your work at this event.
Tentative Agenda:
- 11:00am-1:00pm: Promising Practices Browsing Fair (Library or CASL)
- 1:00-2:00pm: Lunch with student panel (Kochoff)
- 2:00-4:00pm: A variety of learning sessions
We hope you can join us for our 2nd annual summit that provides an opportunity for faculty, staff and students to share, learn and contribute to a campus-wide conversation on retention and graduation.
How do I confirm participation and what is the deadline to complete the participation?
We ask you complete the participation form by the following dates:
Submission of a Promising Practice Deadline: January 31
Participation Deadline: February 7
Common FAQs about the Promising Practices Browsing Fair:
Recognizing improvement in retention and graduation rates is the result of many small efforts, we want to hear from faculty, staff and from teams that have executed some impactful practices to retain our students. We will prioritize featured initiatives based on:
- Is the initiative or practice evidence based, innovative or scalable?
- How does the initiative or practice align with the university mission?
We would like some visuals (e.g. poster, video) to help tell the story about why this is a promising practice to help support retention and graduation efforts. If possible, we are also interested in understanding how your practice can be implemented more widely on campus. This information will help support additional conversations on Friday afternoon. If you are aware of a student or students who have benefited from your practice in a positive way, we would love to meet them. You are welcome to invite them to the event.
Yes, if a department wants to feature an initiative that reflects cross-collaboration, even better. Only one team member will then submit the request for participation.
The committee will do its best to feature as many practices as time will allow. We will let you know by February 7 if your initiative has been selected this year. We thank you in advance for your willingness to participate and share your ideas.
Some ideas to consider:
- Reflective writing and oral presentation in project classes as an alternative to paper testing
- Open office hours
- The use of "soft assignments" to help students deal with curiosity, connections, and the creation of value
- Helping students find their voice by implementing a mission-based advising approach using a mission statement and mission map
- Review or bootcamp sessions
- Video tutorials
Below are some great examples from last year:
The Office of Student Life does support Single Banner/Poster Prints:
To request a banner to be printed you must fill out the request form on Victor's Link and submit it at least five academic days before the desired print/pickup date. All banners should be submitted as PDFs.
Note: If you indicate that this is for the Graduation and Summit the cost will be covered.