New Drive to Aid Feeling of Being Left to Hang Dry

Students call it “the sophomore slump” — that feeling, common to second-year students, of being pressured to make decisions about majors, studying abroad and, ultimately, life. The College may finally have a solution. For the past year, a “Sophomore Experience” committee of Middlebury staff, faculty and student representatives has been working to improve the channels of communication and guidance available to sophomores. Among the initiatives is the Sophomore Advising Dinner for the Humanities and Literature held on Sept. 30, designed to help sophomores pick a major.

It worked for Will Brennan ’16. He walked into the Atwater Dining Hall that night and felt immediately “intimidated” by the set up: round table seating, with each table assigned a different department as marked by large signs. He had hoped to explore a variety of majors and was reluctant to pick just one table. At last, however, he found himself engaged in “really beneficial conversation” about “not only the benefits of specific majors but about the benefits of finding your true interests and shaping your major choices from there.”

Sophomores know the feeling well. It is assumed that first-year students need ample guidance as they navigate college life. But come the second year, they feel as if they should already know their academic directions.

“You’re supposed to know how to operate at Middlebury and you’re supposed to know how to make decisions about big things like your major, which feels like making a decision about your career and the rest of your life,” said Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5. “But you just don’t feel like you’re prepared at all, and you don’t know who to really talk to about it.”

Brennan’s initial reaction to the dinner reflected what he called “the sophomore slump.” An upper classmen friend had described the term for him as “sophomores’ overall feelings of [being] overwhelmed by the situation they face — the feeling that they need to determine the future then and there.” The eventual resolution of his uncertainty was a sign that the dinner had done its job in helping to soothe the sophomore slump.

The dinner was just one of many proposed initiatives set forth by the committee.  The Sophomore Experience Committee was co-chaired by Ross Commons Head Maria Hatjigeorgiou and Associate Dean for Fellowships & Research Lisa Gates. Leadership also included Director of Learning Resources Yonna McShane, Deborah Evans, Hector Vila and two student representatives — Kathryn Benson ’12 and Nick Warren ’15.

Formed at the request of Dean of the College Shirley Collado and the Vice President for Academic Affairs Tim Spears, the committee met regularly from October 2012 to March 2013 when they submitted their written proposal: “Strengthening the Sophomore Experience: Recommendations from the Sophomore Experience Committee.” The initiatives outlined in the document include the five divisions dinners — where sophomores can meet and receive both practical and personal advice from “well-seasoned” professors or department heads of departments they may be interested in, as well as improved communication from and guidelines for Residential Advisers and first-year advisers.

The difficulties associated with the sophomore year are not news. Neither is the Sophomore Experience Committee the first to lend a critical eye to the sophomore year at the College, but it is the first to have gained momentum.

Meanwhile, Wonnacott Commons Head and Associate Professor of Education Jonathan Miller-Lane, though not a member of the committee, is pursuing a separate but similarly focused project: a pilot course entitled, “Sophomore Seminar in the Liberal Arts.” During summer 2012, Miller-Lane, Evans and Head of Cook Commons and Professor of Italian Patricia Zupan and English and American Department Chair Brett Millier applied for and received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities; they designed a course which would focus on enduring questions: “What is the Good Life and How Shall I Live It?”

“We are part of a group who is looking to focus on the experience of sophomores... as [they make] decisions about majors. We wanted to use this course as a contribution to that discussion,” said Zupan, who is also teaching the course this year. Professors Evans and Millier will begin teaching the course next fall.

The Sophomore Seminar asks students to consider the question of the Good Life through reading texts ranging from Aristotle to The Essential Koran. But it is unique in its endeavor to incorporate concrete questions about life as a student at the College into the discussion.

“Yes, we do text analysis, yes, we try to get historical context for the texts that we’re doing, but we also don’t want to run away from the conversations about what choices are we making when we walk out of class,” Miller-Lane said. “Today we were reading the Koran, analyzing verses, and then [the student facilitators] were asking us to think about, well what is it like to be a Muslim on campus? And [we] have that discussion in class as a legitimate topic so that we can move back and forth between analyzing the text and the implications of a being [a] person of faith in this community. If being at a residential liberal arts college is supposed to mean something — to come together as a community — can we talk about the way we live together here as one element of the course?”

While Miller-Lane and Zupan asked their students to look critically at their lives on campus while in the classroom, the Sophomore Committee is also working towards a goal of “seamless learning” as Professror Hatjigeorgeiou said, by pulling residential and academic advisors more deeply into all aspects of student life.

The committee’s recommendations were born of extensive research, both on what other institutions are currently doing to ease the transitions faced by sophomores as well as from the College student, faculty and staff focus groups.

Hatjigeorgiou pointed out that a major theme brought to light by the student focus groups was students feeling “abandoned” or “forgotten” by their first-year academic advisers. A student representative to serve on the committee, Warren, agreed.

“[The commitee] began by talking about advising, and we realized that what we needed to do was to fix all the things that are wrong with the first year,” Warren said. “And [we realized] that the sophomore year starts with the first year and with the first-year seminar.”

One of the potential issues with first-year advisers is that that they may go on sabbaticals the following year. For whatever reason, they may not be fully committed to advising their students for more than a year. Warren admitted that the committee did not even favor the term “first-year adviser” because “it’s not just about the first year.”

But according to Hatjigeorgiou, “steps are now [being] taken” to strengthen the role of first-year advisers.

“Expectations are now more clearly articulated to the faculty who teach the first-year seminars so that [they] are more fully aware of the fact that they are advising the first-year seminar well into the first semester of the sophomore year,” Hatjigeorgiou said.

A second set of key players to the sophomore experience initiatives are the Residential Advisers, who are assigned to sophomore dorms and are often sophomores themselves. While it may seem counter-intuitive to have sophomores guiding sophomores, they act not as authority figures, but as peer resources. The committee proposed that the number of residential advisers be increased to one per sophomore floor and that they receive increased pay in concordance with their “expanded responsibilities.” These proposals were passed for the 2013-2014 school year.

Millikin, for example, a dormitory in Ross consisting of five halls of sophomores, now employs five residential advisers — one for each hall — instead of two, as there have been in the past. Importantly, it was also recommended that these advisers be given responsibilities distinctly different from those of first-year counselors: residential advisers are charged with frequently reminding their peers about important upcoming deadlines — major declaration, study abroad applications — as well as being knowledgeable about key offices and tools around campus such as the Center for Careers and Internships.