Your College Experience

Written by the leading authorities on the first-year seminar, Your College Experience offers students practical help in making the transition to college and getting the most out of their time there. Because new students have to juggle challenges as diverse as getting along with roommates, keeping up with a heavier study load, conducting research, and planning for a career, Your College Experience covers a full range of survival, study, academic, and work skills.

Speaking with evident respect for students at all kinds of institutions, with all kinds of learning styles, and with all kinds of backgrounds, the authors ask them to consider their own goals, their purposes for being in college. Your College Experience then gives students what they need to take control: concrete information, active learning opportunities, critical thinking strategies for making good decisions, and the nuts-and-bolts tools for making these decisions into reality.

Added material in the eighth edition addresses new and growing issues in students’ worlds, including avoiding academic dishonesty, creating a portfolio, using technology effectively, achieving information literacy, and managing online relationships. Additionally, a series of interviews with real students shows how others are handling the challenges of the college experience.

Written by the leading authorities on the first-year seminar, Your College Experience offers students practical help in making the transition to college and getting the most out of their time there. Because new students have to juggle challenges as diverse as getting along with roommates, keeping up with a heavier study load, conducting research, and planning for a career, Your College Experience covers a full range of survival, study, academic, and work skills.

Speaking with evident respect for students at all kinds of institutions, with all kinds of learning styles, and with all kinds of backgrounds, the authors ask them to consider their own goals, their purposes for being in college. Your College Experience then gives students what they need to take control: concrete information, active learning opportunities, critical thinking strategies for making good decisions, and the nuts-and-bolts tools for making these decisions into reality.

Added material in the eighth edition addresses new and growing issues in students’ worlds, including avoiding academic dishonesty, creating a portfolio, using technology effectively, achieving information literacy, and managing online relationships. Additionally, a series of interviews with real students shows how others are handling the challenges of the college experience.

John N. Gardner brings unparalleled experience to this writing partnership for American higher education's authoritative text for first-year seminar courses. He is the recipient of his institution's highest award for teaching excellence. He has 25 years of experience directing and teaching in the most respected and widely emulated first-year seminar in the U.S., the University 101 course at the University of South Carolina. Gardner is universally recognized as one of the country's leading higher educators for his role in initiating and orchestrating an international reform movement to improve the beginning college experience, a concept he coined as "the first-year experience." He is the founding executive director of two very influential higher education centers which support campuses in their efforts to improve the learning and retention of beginning college students: the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina (www.sc.edu/fye), and the Policy Center on the First Year of College in Brevard, N.C. (www.fyfoundations.org). The experiential basis for all of his work is his own miserable first year of college on academic probation, an experience he hopes to prevent for many of this book's readers.

Jerome Jewler is a best-selling author, educator, and friend to students. A distinguished professor emeritus of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies as well as codirector of the University 101 first-year seminar at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, Jewler has guided advertising students through the creative and writing processes and has helped hundreds of new students determine their goals. As University 101 codirector, he planned and conducted training workshops for first-year seminar instructors, won a Mortar Board award for teaching excellence, and was recognized as USC advisor of the year and nationally as the Distinguished Advertising Educator in 2000.

Betsy O. Barefoot is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose special area of scholarship is the first-year seminar. During her tenure at USC from 1988 to 1999, she served as codirector for research and publications at the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. She also taught University 101 and graduate courses on the first-year experience and the principles of college teaching. She conducts first-year seminar faculty training workshops around the world and is frequently called on to evaluate first-year seminar outcomes. Betsy is codirector and senior scholar in the Policy Center on the First Year of College in Brevard, North Carolina, where she led a major national research project to identify "institutions of excellence" in the first college year.