The Student Success Initiative
The Student Success Undergraduate Advisory Board was created in 2007 as the Provost Undergraduate Student Advisory Board to provide feedback on programs, policies, and initiatives established or supervised by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. In Fall 2023, the name of the board was updated to Student Success Undergraduate Advisory Board to best reflect the student success focus of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
SSUAB’s 2023-24 Projects:
Every year, our board members brainstorm pressing areas that they want to see change in throughout the campus community. Their perspectives and experiences culminate in three small group projects for each academic board year. The following three topics were brainstormed, executed, and presented by our most recent Student Success Undergraduate Advisory Board.
Inclusivity Spaces
The Inclusivity Spaces Project Team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is committed to amplifying and addressing the diverse voices of our student body. By conducting a comprehensive needs assessment survey, our goal is to identify and respond to students’ unique experiences and requirements, ensuring an inclusive and supportive campus environment for all.
First-Year Experience
The First-Year Experience team is actively addressing the inequalities with the first-year experience courses offered across the many colleges at the University of Illinois by assessing what’s most important for students to be exposed to during their first year at their respective colleges. Along with this, we are honing in on methods to increase the comfortability of students during their first year and the readiness they feel to adequately engage in the professional atmosphere throughout their college career and beyond. We look forward to integrating positive changes within the university’s student body.
Food Insecurity
We have been exploring the many resources for food insecurity on campus and have decided to pitch a multi-faceted solution because we could not simply choose one idea and there is always a need for more resources. There are so many wonderful ideas our team has created such as non- perishable pop-up cabinets, a virtual dining dollar roll-over bank, an updated centralized food insecurity resource page managed by the university, or a free food event category on the new One Illinois RSO website. We have also been brainstorming for an Illini Fighting Hunger Day. The Fighting Hunger Day would entail a set of tables on the quad or in the union, each represented by a different service on campus that fights hunger. We plan on briefly pitching all of these ideas while weaving testimony from a roundtable discussion we hosted with various leaders from around campus (representatives from ISC, Illini Moms, the UI Senate, dining services, Interfaith, and various food pantries). We generated many helpful ideas from this discussion that further informed how we would like to structure our pitch. Many of these individuals have expressed deep interest in participating in a Fighting Hunger quad event.
SSUAB’s Past Projects:
Centralized Resources
First-Year Experience
We’re working to improve the first-year experience course offered to freshmen and transfer students. The first step was to consider the different syllabuses for similarities and differences across the different colleges on campus. We noticed that there are certain discrepancies, such as there not being an organized curriculum across all colleges. The next step was to discuss how we could collect data in order to see how students felt about the courses. We created a survey in which students can express their feelings about the class and rate the various skills required to succeed during their time at the University of Illinois. We hope that the information gathered will enable us to compile a list of FYE course objectives to prioritize. We are currently in the process of distributing the survey to various audiences by posting posters, sharing on social media, sharing with friends, and so on.