Student Run Coffee House

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Expand the Menu of Majors

For better or worse, one way that prospective students search for colleges is by looking for particular majors, and one way that prospective students' enthusiasms about higher education are excited is by imagining themselves majoring in various things.  In short, the list of majors (again, FBOW) functions a bit like the menu in the restaurant window.

It may well be that Mills does not optimally present the possibilities that prospective students would find here (in other words, students CAN do more than it looks like they can).  Our offerings in terms of majors are, for the most part, program- and department-bound.  We have been (wisely, we probably feel) rather conservative in this regard.  We have developed a few (e.g. intermedia arts, public policy), but we tend right away to think of these as programs/proto-departments that need to stand on their own.  Our experiments in expanding student options within the existing envelope of course offerings are fewer.

This proposal is for more consideration of moderately creative multi-disciplinary majors that put together courses from different areas.  They can be "housed" in a given department but draw on courses in multiple departments.  We have some models for this (there is an anthropology/sociology degree, for example, that uses parts of the sociology major but substitutes several anthropology courses).  This is arguably the very spirit of the liberal arts.

We rightly worry about falsely advertising things we can't really offer, but there might be attractive majors that we do have the courses for (or that we almost do and that a strategic supplementary hire would leverage).  This might be an opportunity to define new positions that can create multiple such leverages.  Strategically, this should be co-driven by what would really enhance the attractiveness of our repertoire of majors and what existing curricular resources are most exploitable via strategic investment.

SEE ALSO comment on other post

Collaborative Work Spaces

Many folks have in recent semesters mentioned that students had taken over the faculty dining room to use as collaborative work space.  The most common reaction seems to be to interpret this as a problem to be solved.  Might it, instead, be a glaring statement about a need?  It's a poorly lit room with furniture and decor that's not been update in ages and yet it's one of the most "successful" offerings we have in terms of student work spaces.

To enhance the undergraduate experience let's build on this free data about what students want/need and look around the campus to see where we can create spaces with similar functionality.  Of course, that means we have to start by understanding the features that make this space attractive.  One might speculate that it's centrality and proximity to food.  Perhaps it's the layout (dense but not too dense?) and furniture (round tables that seat 4-6).

We should approach this not as a need to displace students from the FDR but as an opportunity to create other spaces (in the library, for example) that are "user friendly" not according to some theory or what a consultant tells us, but based on how our students seem to be using this one and ones like it.  What other spaces are currently used intensely like this one?  What do they have in common?  What features make each stand out?  Where are there opportunities to reproduce some of these features?

Community Based Curriculum

Why don't we see if we couldn't focus (at least part of) the undergrad curriculum more on community based learning (service learning) and collaborative research projects with local governments, companies or non-profits.  If we built up the Center for Urban Schools Partnerships (CUSP) as the core of such an effort and then used resources associated with that to really make it worthwhile for departments and programs to partner with it we could start making our location in Oakland a very visible asset rather than a liability that we subtly hide behind pictures of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge in our brochures.  Packaged right, it would be VERY desirable to incoming students.  People who speak to potential students at admissions events will tell you they always perk up when one talks about working with nonprofits and city government.  It's a perfect vehicle for making education practical and "real" while at the same time maintaining its intellectual rigor.

One could imagine creating a framework that defined different kinds of community collaboration, some appropriate for beginning students, some appropriate for students just beginning their training in, say, research methods, and some appropriate for advanced students with specialized skills.  Instructors could connect their courses with such a framework without having to re-invent things on their own.  With enough such activity it would be cost-effective to have some staff to coordinate activity and to have space dedicated to the partnership center.

Getting this off the ground would not be as heavy lifting as one might think since so many pieces are already in place and we have some experience with past projects in this vein.

Eventually, graduate and professional students might be organized along the lines of what law schools and policy schools often call "clinics" -- mini-consultancies based at the school and supervised by professors or professors of practice (or clinical professors) and providing services to community members or community based organizations.  The most obvious connections here would be PPOL and MBA and ED but one can imagine a role for arts graduate students as well.

An important part of such an initiative is to build enough of an infrastructure that the whole thing does not just depend on a few faculty members' dedication.  The resource flows and the benefits to students have to be positive enough that it is a good idea apart from the fact that it is a worthy idea.

Capitalize on Public Performance/Lecture Spaces

Over the past few years, venues such as bars and cafes position themselves in the market by offering artists, authors, and now, scientists and researchers, opportunities to present their work or to just lecture on a particular topic.  How about a concerted effort to take advantage of such venues with a coordinated set of Mills offerings by faculty, staff, and/or students?  What would be needed is to build an infrastructure that would act as a sort of agency for linking the Mills side (presenters) with the community side (the venues and programs).   

We already have a preliminary efforts at things like encouraging faculty to do media interviews or write op-eds; this could be seen as an expansion of those efforts and a variation on performance outreach mentioned in another post.

Some examples:

Nerd Nite SF:  http://sf.nerdnite.com  

Nerd Nite East Bay https://www.facebook.com/groups/370443193014244/?ref=ts&fref=ts

Tenderloin Reading Series https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tenderloin-Reading-Series/175566989177413

Make the 2+3 Engineering Program Really Work

Proposal 

Figure out how to make our 2+3 Engineering Program with USC more “Mills,” perhaps by adding more freshman and sophomore level intro engineering courses.

Rationale

We currently have a program with USC where a student will take the first two years of coursework at Mills and then transfer to USC to complete her engineering degree.  This is an innovative program that really does have the potential to attract to Mills smart students that we will not otherwise attract.  To date, though, we have not dedicate resources to it that would help it to thrive.

The program doesn’t work well in practice for a variety of reasons.

• First, students must walk in to Mills knowing they want to be engineers on day one. If a student doesn’t get onto the engineering track the first semester of her first year, she won’t be able to do it. 
• Second, two of the more popular fields, civil and mechanical, aren’t feasible under this program. Our program only caters to the more science-based engineering degree (chemical, computer, biomedical, environmental). 
• Third, without critical mass there is very little chance for the good experience of current 3+2 engineering students to be visible enough to recruit others.

What Would It Take

• To support all engineering sub-fields, we could add a few intro engineering courses. 
• To encourage current students to consider the program, a first semester overview and introduction to engineering could be offered.
• To remove the rigidity problem faculty could develop slight modifications to course scheduling that would introduce the necessary flexibility for, say, deciding before second semester.
• To increase flexibility, summer courses might be offered.
• A more robust program could be better marketed by admissions.

Research/Data

What do we know about how many students are drawn by our engineering program?  What are the numbers for young women interested in engineering overall.  Followup with students who have gone through program (0 have finished; 3 are in process at USC). What courses we need to offer to make our program more effective.

See Also

Occidental 3+2 Program (a useful FAQ and curriculum plan)