Student Affairs

• Continue to review processes and look for ways to simplify/streamline whenever possible.
• When there are continual pain points, challenges, or overly complicated processes use that to identify a solution. Put your time toward finding/creating/requesting automation to improve the process. It will take additional time in the beginning to determine and implement a solution. Once the solution is implemented it will make up for the extra time it took to identify/make the changes.

The Career and Transfer Center collaborated with the Administration of Justice Studies Program to develop a customized resume handout that maps course and program outcomes to the NACE Career Competencies. This tool seeks to help students communicate their classroom experience into career-ready, transferable skills. Initial feedback suggests faculty satisfaction and engagement with career services as a result of the handout, improved Career Navigator confidence to guide specific career skill conversations, and improved resume quality.

GradAppaLooza (Transfer and Job Fair) is an annual event organized by Estrella Mountain County Community College's (EMCC) Career and Education Planning team, in coordination with Workforce Development, Admissions and Records, and Advisement! This event is aimed at providing opportunities for students transitioning to the next phase of their academic or professional journey.

The Personal Allies for Learning Success (PALS) program at Estrella Mountain Community College, which operated under a Title V grant, aimed to improve student success metrics, including persistence, retention, GPA, and credit completion. This assessment evaluates the program's effectiveness by comparing PALS participants with non-participants over the 2023–2024 academic year. The results showed that PALS participants consistently outperformed their peers in persistence, retention, GPA, and credit completion.

CAPS PLO assessment to measure CAPS student learning at the program level.  

Student applicants to the DRS office are not prepared for their eligibility meeting. Students do not actively participate and struggle to provide thoughtful/applicable answers to questions.  Some also express a sense of nervousness as if they are on a job interview, which complicates their ability to fully participate in the process.

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The FA office provides workshops for employees as well as students because Financial Aid and Scholarship processes are complex. This is especially true with Title IV FA federal regulations. EMCC FA staff are responsible for these regulations/processes and assisting students. Non-FA employees who work with students often request general financial aid and scholarship workshops so they can better service students in relation to how their roles affect the student's FA. As money is critical to EMCC students they may make decisions about their education based on the financial aid impact.

College Success Week events aim to connect students with members of the College Community to build connections vital to their success. Roary’s Amazing Race was developed this year as a way to re-envision how information about campus resources is provided to students more effectively for campus resource staff and more engaging for students. As students traveled the pathway to earning their free t-shirt, they were given information by each pit stop on upcoming campus events that may interest them (i.e. upcoming shows at the PAC).

Intrusive advising services were provided to 33 sections of developmental courses reaching a total of 767 students.  Persistence outcomes were the variable of interest to determine impact of this practice.  Findings suggest that intrusive advising support higher levels of Fall to Spring student persistence, in particular during priority registration.

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Recording attendance at campus events continues to be a campus-wide challenge as paper sign-ins are not an efficient way to sign students in to events and programs. Employees spend a great deal of time manually integrating the student data into other on-line systems. Students’ handwriting can also be unreadable at times resulting in inaccurate data to track students longitudinally and be able to measure the impact of campus events on student persistence, retention, and completion.

The “I Will Graduate” team noticed challenges with the Student Success Fair passport because some students were not completing all four zones and earning their prize. Mirroring the principles of guided pathways, the committee decided to create a passport that progressed through a pathway of zones rather than letting the students pick and choose which zone they wanted to visit. Students began in the CTL by watching an orientation video, and then progressed through the zone in this order: (1) Learn, (2) Engage, (3) Connect, (4) Graduate.

The EMCC “Ask Me” Team was created to help students with aspects of the enrollment cycle during the first week of classes.The first iteration of the Ask Me Model entailed long trainings for employees in order to master the concepts of different student affairs departments. The “Ask Me” Coordinating Team chose to take a different approach to welcoming students in order to quickly and efficiently give them “just in time answers”. First, the long training sessions were eliminated and volunteers were asked to become Ask Me Guides, not subject matter experts.