The Senior Year Experience: Facilitating Integration, Reflection, Closure, and Transition

Make the end of college as promising as the Beginning The Senior Year Experience is the long–awaited sequel to the 1989 classic book The Freshman Year Experience. Like its highly acclaimed predecessor, this important book fills a gap in the literature on the topic of student transition. The Senior Year Experience offers a blueprint of the best ideas and strategies for ensuring that the end of the college experience is as promising as the beginning. Editors John N. Gardner and Gretchen Van der Veer provide a wealth of information for enriching college students′ final year with courses and programs designed to give meaning to their undergraduate experience. They also offer practical strategies for improving the passage from senior year into the workforce or graduate school. The Senior Year Experience features original contributions from expert scholars and practitioners in the field. They reveal the criteria for creating effective capstone courses and offer suggestions on how to design capstone experiences that will ensure success. The authors also outline many ways to enhance the citizenship development of graduating seniors, including integrating service learning into the general education program, establishing community centers, implementing leadership programs, and embracing diversity and multiculturalism on campus. Drawing on exemplary programs from a wide variety of institutions, the book is filled with illustrative examples of curricular and cocurricular approaches that help seniors develop the skills necessary to succeed in graduate school and the professional workplace. In addition to outlining the necessary information on how to develop and implement senior year programs, the authors tackle the thorny issues of how to create new programs in times of scarce resources.

UNDERSTANDING THE UNIQUE NEEDS OF TODAY′S SENIORS. 1. The Emerging Movement to Strengthen the Senior Experience ( John N.Gardner & Gretchen Van der Veer ). 2. Obectives and Benefits of Senior Year Programs ( Joseph B. Cuseo ). 3. Moving On: Seniors as People in Transition ( Arthur W. Chickering & Nancy K. Schlossberg ). 4. A President′s Personal and Historical Perspective ( Arthur Levine ). 5. Are College Seniors Prepared to Work? ( Philip D. Gardner ). ENHANCING THE SENIOR YEAR EXPERIENCE. 6. Curricular Structures for Cumulative Learning ( Barbara Leigh Smith ). 7. Preparing Students for Life Beyond the Classroom ( Elwood F. Holton, III ). 8. Leadership Education in the Senior Experience ( Stephen W. Schwartz & Nance Lucas ). 9. Developing "Civic Virtue" Among College Students ( Linda J. Sax & Alexander W. Astin ). 10. Strengthening the Ties That Bind: Cultural Events, Rituals, and Traditions ( George D. Kuh ). 11. Creating Pathways to Graduate School ( Richard B. Lawhon ). DEVELOPING SPECIAL SUPPORT SERVICES FOR SENIORS. 12. Comprehensive Career Services for Seniors ( Denise Dwight Smith & Linda K. Gast ). 13. College–to–Career Transition Programs for Multiethnic Students ( Linda Bates Parker, et al. ). 14. Preparing Seniors for Roles as Active Alumni ( Jeffery W. Johnson & Peter D. Eckel ). IMPLICATIONS FOR CAMPUS SERVICES AND PRACTICES. 15. Looking Back, Moving Ahead: Assessment in the Senior Year ( Karl L. Schilling & Karen Maitland Schilling ). 16. Mobilizing Campus Support for Senior Year Programs ( William L. Thomas, Jr. ). 17. A Summary Agenda for Enriching the Senior Year ( John N. Gardner & Gretchen Van der Veer ).

JOHN N. GARDNER is executive director, National Resource Center for The Freshman Year Experience and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina. GRETCHEN VAN DER VEER is director of staff training and development, Corporation for National Service.