Students protest possible changes to Preterm experience
Staff Writer
Students are concerned with losing what they came to love as preterm.
Patrick Cassidy (07) said, “Preterm is the best time to put names to faces and a great time to adjust to college life, but you only get out of it what you put into it.”
The late night 7-11 runs with your Orientation Councilor, the wet times spent on the “slip and slide”, library orientation trips, and the Freshman All-Nighter all help to get first year students as excited about Alma as possible.
In addition to the Martin Luther King Jr. and Sexual Assault Awareness task forces is the First Year Experience task force (FYETF) which was charged with “identifying new directions for a first year experience.”
Marc Hong (07) of the FYETF said that the one of the main problems with preterm was the “differing levels of academic rigor.”
The task force showed its interest for student input last week by hosting forums for student comments and concerns. Some thirty students showed up at the Thursday night forum and expressed their desire to keep what they knew as preterm. Why would all these students show up to defend something that would never really have any effect on them?
Kay Grimnes, professor of biology, said that it does in fact have an effect on students because they are concerned with “maintaining the quality of education that Alma College has been known to offer.”
One of the things brought up at the forum was that preterm is part of the tradition that makes Alma a “college of distinction.” Jillian Cline (06) said, “If this program is taken away, it forces Alma to become more like every other college or university in the US. Any student who has participated in preterm as a student or O.C. will speak very highly of the program and that it is one of the most memorable experience of their first year.”
Hong joins the faculty as the only student representative on the task force. The task force has designed three models to send to the Educational Policy Committee which they will ultimately choose one or none to implement as early as next year.
The three models devised by the FYETF vary in complexity from model one being the least complex to model three being the most complex.
Some commonalities in the models are a First Year Seminar, which will require students to take place in campus events and engage in discussion based on them among other things, and learning communities. It appears that these models are still works in progress and the three models can be viewed in more detail in a packet available around campus.
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