Meet the Honors College's Student Success Assistants
By Samuel Cavalheiro
Content
Navigating the Honors experience is better with someone in your corner. Fortunately, within Commonwealth Honors College, student success assistants work together to foster a welcoming and productive environment for all of our Honors students. The assistants support student success initiatives at CHC, deliver academic support to their peers, and help inform CHC to improve resources and outreach.
Alice Feldman, honors experience and student success coordinator, leads this team of hardworking student success assistants. She views the role of the success assistant as a vital bridge that fosters a more welcoming and beneficial environment at CHC.
"This position was created for us to have a student voice in the development of programs, events, and interventions—really, anything that can improve the student experience," says Feldman. "They are student consultants, helping us understand how their experience might be different from other students and using those insights to design new programming for the benefit of everyone."
Filling the Gaps and Removing Obstacles
For the students currently working in these positions, the work is both fulfilling academically and personally. rlboyer [at] umass [dot] edu (Rowan Boyer), a student success assistant, a senior psychology major, and a transfer student hailing from Berkshire Community College, says her identity as a transfer student informs her unique perspective as a success assistant. She has a keen awareness of the hurdles students face that can make any school feel daunting.
"I felt that identity gave me more grounds for this position because there are more obstacles as a transfer student," Boyer explains. "We are here to assist the success of the students, but specifically, we are trying to find gaps that need to be filled and fix any obstacles that are holding students back."
The day-to-day work of the student success assistant consists of both high-level strategizing and hands-on support. This means weekly strategy meetings with stakeholders, pitching ideas to CHC administrators, analyzing large troves of data to better understand student feedback and experiences, amongst many other responsibilities.
For Boyer, this role provides the rare opportunity to engage in research and leadership outside of a traditional lab setting, where transfer students are often at a disadvantage given their different circumstances.
"This position gives me the space to play around with research and add it to my resume. We’ve had to create long presentations and present them to the dean—it’s been great practice for graduate school."
Thesis Tuesdays and Wellness Week
Students can interact with Boyer and her fellow student success assistant Kya Ransom through two events they created: Thesis Tuesdays and CHC Wellness Week.
Thesis Tuesdays, held from 2 to 4 p.m. in the CHC Hub (Room 230 above Roots), are designed to better support students undergoing the thesis process. Modeled after graduate-level writing support groups, Thesis Tuesdays provide an environment where students can drop in and access the CHC writing coach, student success assistants, the new Honors Thesis Toolkit, or just a quiet space to focus and be held accountable.
"Whether you are deep in the writing phase or just need someone to sit next to you while you finally Google that one article, our assistants are there for that," Feldman notes. "It’s about building a community of scholars where no one has to work in isolation."
The team’s work extends beyond academics and touches many aspects of the CHC student experience. This year, the student success team will begin the inaugural CHC Wellness Week, a student-led program meant to better foster a sense of belonging at CHC. Everything from resume workshops to therapy dogs will be available to students, and the first 20 students who attend five events will get a prize!
Looking Ahead
For any Honors student looking for support, whether it's finding faculty to sponsor an Honors Thesis or simply finding a place to write, the student success assistants are ready to help. As Feldman puts it, “everyone's job touches on student success, but these students are the ones making sure we stay focused on what students actually need.”
Featuring
Samuel Cavalheiro
