GARY, Ind. — Students who attend colleges and universities with on-campus living normally have time to acclimate after moving in. They can freely explore campus, meet new people and get comfortable with their new surroundings before entering their first class.
At Indiana University Northwest, there’s a different way for students to bridge the gap to college. It’s a chance to meet soon-to-be classmates, mingle with professors and get a sense of what to expect in a university setting.
Summer Bridge allows students to take the first step in their college career while also giving them college credit and money toward books.
“The idea with the model is that it’s supposed to introduce students to college through the eyes of an academic discipline,” STEM Summer Bridge Coordinator and College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean Kris Huysken said. “It’s so that students start to develop a sense of belonging before they come to campus for their first day of classes.”
What is Summer Bridge?
Summer Bridge is a week-long active learning experience that allows students to explore programs based on their future interests.
The 2024 program, which had around 70 incoming students, included cohorts in STEM, humanities, social and behavioral sciences, business and healthcare.
Each cohort began with a field trip to West Beach in the Indiana Dunes National Park, listening to Dig the Dunes Founder Eve Wierzbicki and Save the Dunes Development Director Lisa Scheller while setting the basis of the projects they worked on for the remainder of the week.
While each cohort focused on different activities – STEM students participated in a small water quality monitoring project, business students looked at how to improve the Dunes’ offseason marketing strategies, healthcare students explored different careers in the College of Health and Human Services and more – all their projects focused on one central theme: a sustainable Northwest Indiana.
“This program has prepared me a lot for what I should expect from my upcoming classes,” incoming business student Kayla Oberholtzer said. “Two of my professors are in the Summer Bridge program, so that gives me a good idea of what to look forward to.”
In addition to meeting professors, students met their future classmates and peer mentors who help throughout the week and answer all their college questions.
“I was able to meet a lot of people and it makes you feel more comfortable being a part of the community in this college,” actuarial science major Luke Baczkowski said. “The professors were great, and the teaching assistants were helpful giving insight into the whole college process.”
The program ran four hours daily – from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. – allowing working students to participate by adjusting their work schedules instead of taking entire days off.
A first successful step in college
IU Northwest has run Summer Bridge programs or others like it for years, with more disciplines being added to the programming over recent years.
“What we convey to the students is that this helps you succeed, and it does,” Huysken said. “It’s associated with greater retention and student success.”
Students participating in the Summer Bridge program have a 10-30 percent higher retention rate (year-over-year and semester-over-semester) than the rest of the student population.
For Huysken, it would be a dream if all incoming freshmen participated in the program since the experiences gained have proven to result in long-term collegiate success.
“This kind of program is important on any college campus but on a commuter campus we can struggle sometimes to develop that deep sense of belonging or connection with the campus,” Huysken said. “Students come for classes and they go back home, they’re not living here on campus and don’t have quite that same interaction that students on residential campuses have. This is one way to help foster that connection.”
Fostering deeper connections
Julia Wheeler, a sophomore geology major from Calumet Township, came to IU Northwest after working as a union carpenter for a year.
After taking a gap year following high school, Wheeler was looking for something to ease the transition to college. She decided to participate in Summer Bridge and came back the following year to serve as a mentor.
“I still talk to people from last year who were in the Summer Bridge, so it was really nice to make those connections last year,” Wheeler, who’s also a STEM Center tutor, said. “I wanted to try and be someone’s mentor and be able to have more connections to younger students.”
Students in the program this year, such as business marketing student Sebastian Zarate, said he wouldn’t mind “giving back” to Summer Bridge and coming back as a future mentor, either.
Whether it’s through the connections built, comfortability gained or confidence instilled, IU Northwest’s Summer Bridge program has continued to be an invaluable resource for both the short- and long-term success of future RedHawks.
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