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Stories of the First-Year Experience
Kevin Foster (Senior Lecturer - Faculty of Arts)
My own experience of transition is confined to students who have participated in the enhancement studies courses which I teach. On the whole, it seems to me that students who have had the benefit of an enhancement course have enjoyed a gentle, phased introduction to the university experience; they have had the opportunity to experience university curriculum, teaching and assessment all within the familiar confines of the school environment. This has been linked to a couple of visits to Monash, where they have received lectures and tutorials from different staff members, and an introduction to the library and the university's various social facilities. All in all, this means that by the time they come to university they have a few vital things in place: they know what is expected of them in lecture and tutorial situations; they have had a year of working under their own guidance, planning and preparing their own work, blending their tertiary studies in with other pressing commitments (school, work, home, sport, etc); they have been prepared for the size and, in some ways, impersonality of the campus, they know their way around, or at least they can find their way from lecture theatres to tutorial rooms, to the library and the student union; in short, the experience has demystified university for them. They will certainly have lots more to learn when they get here in full; there will be new social networks to establish, new patterns of study and work to negotiate, but the enhancement students have had an all important introduction. The past enhancement students I meet around the campus express some of the familiar gripes of most first year students, too much choice, restrictive timetabling, overcrowding, etcetera. Many find that the course they had intended to study does not meet their expectations and they strike out in new areas; but for all of them, I'd say, an enhancement ear has taken most of the fear and many of the unpleasant surprises out of their experience of university.
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