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Atlanta, GA | Posted: May 23, 2016
Cory Hopkins
Office of Undergraduate Education
Summary Sentence:
Lacy Hodges, academic transition programs manager in the Center for Academic Enrichment, talks about how and why this course was developed and how it may continue to evolve.
Full Summary:
Lacy Hodges, academic transition programs manager in the Center for Academic Enrichment, talks about how and why this course was developed and how it may continue to evolve.
Lacy Hodges
Student in ClassBy now, most of campus is familiar with GT 1000, the first-year seminar. But some may not know as much about GT 2000.
This course also provides support to new Georgia Tech students, but is designed specifically for those students who transfer to Tech from other colleges and universities. It was originally offered as a special topics course and has now been approved as a standard course offering.
Lacy Hodges, academic transition programs manager in the Center for Academic Enrichment, led the proposal of the course and helped it come to fruition. She talks about how and why this course was developed and how it may continue to evolve.
In 2013, the President’s Mental Health Task Force report, as part of a plan to reduce the stress level of students at Tech, recommended the creation of “a GT 1000 class for transfer students.” Building off of this, the Office of Undergraduate Education recognized that such a transition class would be beneficial to transfer students, but their unique needs meant it should exist separately from GT 1000, which really focuses on the needs of students who are new to the university environment. So GT 2813, a special topics class for transfer students, was created.
By Fall 2015, the demand for space in our GT 2813 classes was greater than our available space for enrollment, which helped us to see how much the incoming transfer students needed this class. After the success of GT 2813, Steven Girardot, associate vice provost for Undergraduate Education, approached me about turning the special class into a standard class.
Georgia Tech has an amazing support system in place for its first-year students, and clearly recognizes how important the first semester is for retaining students and helping them to feel as though they’re part of the Georgia Tech community. Unfortunately, up until fairly recently, there hasn’t been a similar support structure in place for transfer students at Tech. Research has shown that transfer students, especially transfer students to large research institutions, undergo “transfer shock” and they tend to fall behind their peers during their first couple of semesters at their new institution.
Tech can be particularly challenging to new transfer students because of its rigorous academic pace. In order to ensure that our transfer students are successful both academically and personally, it’s essential that they are given the tools and support they need to transition smoothly to Tech.
In addition to GT 2000, there are transfer seminars offered by some departments. Both chemical and biomolecular engineering and electrical and computer engineering offer classes for transfer students to help better prepare them for the challenges of their coursework at Tech. We’re hoping that GT 2000 can complement these classes and that we can expand GT 2000 course offerings so that other departments that would like to offer discipline-specific sections to their incoming transfer students can take advantage of our class and curriculum (much like our GT 1000 discipline-specific sections).
