Welcome to the inaugural edition of our First-Year Programs newsletter. We will use this forum to provide ongoing updates on the various academic, extracurricular, and social initiatives underway at the Sawyer Business School to support and strengthen the first-year experience for our newest SBS students.

Earlier this semester at the Suffolk Convocation we welcomed over 500 new recent high school graduates, transfer students, and Suffolk INTO students to the Sawyer Business School. This cohort will be the first to matriculate at the university since the approval and implementation of our new BSBA undergraduate core curriculum in December 2022. This new curriculum includes a fundamental restructuring of the first-year experience, and we are excited to showcase our innovative course offerings and social opportunities to these new students!

1) The development and planned rollout of a revamped First-Year Programs website that will showcase our program to both an internal and an external audience;

2) The creation of skills and sentiment assessments designed to measure student involvement, sense of belonging, and skills development through their first-year experience – and to facilitate the subsequent transition of these students to their Major program of studies;

3) Ongoing collaboration with our colleagues in Retention, Marketing & Communications, and the SBS Departments to identify areas of strength, opportunities for improvement, and possibilities to further promote the first-year program and SBS as a preferred destination for new undergraduate students.

Under the exemplary direction of Sarah Mellen, the revised careerSTART course (SBS-100) for SBS first-year students was launched in September. The importance of this first course as a venue for our new cohort of students to make a successful transition – academically as well as socially – to university life can hardly be overstated, and the design of SBS-100 places this consideration front and center.

Key elements of the course include ‘Get to Know your Campus Resources’, which encourages students to seek out and interact with staff at a variety of on-campus offices; ‘Support Your Wellness’ modules focused on resiliency, self-care, and study tips; and ‘Making Professional Connections’, which introduces strategies on networking and career planning to these students. In an effort to foster strong connections between academic offerings at this early stage of the undergraduate program, SBS-100 is also linked to SBS-101 (Business Foundations), with students navigating both courses in the same semester.

The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated the headlines recently for its perceived disruptive impact on a variety of sectors, including higher education. Preparing our students for this change by providing them with a fundamental understanding of AI – including its limitations and aspects of its ethical use – is a signature element of our first-year experience. To this end, Pelin Bicen spent over 25 hours over two weeks in September delivering hands-on workshops on this topic to all sections of our SBS-101 course.

The interest of our students in this technology is evident, and sessions of this type are intended to foster an appreciation for the responsible use of AI and create the foundation for more intensive use of these tools where appropriate in our upper-year undergraduate courses.

On September 29th we hosted a Department Open House in the Samia and Sawyer buildings for all SBS first-year students. This event, which is included as a curricular requirement in SBS-100, provides a fun, engaging means for students to learn more about the various departments and programs at the Sawyer Business School. Attendees were encouraged to register for sessions in areas of interest to them – as well as in departments with which they are unfamiliar but that intrigued them. Topics covered by our departments involved general considerations such as career paths in the functional area, as well as more specific issues such as building leadership skills, real estate, and cybersecurity. A small sampling of the sessions conceived of and led for students by our SBS departments is shown below:

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• Wellbeing in College and Beyond

• Entrepreneurship: Much more than starting a business

• Navigating the Data-Driven Future: Business Analytics Unveiled

• Running a Student Investment Fund