First Year Experience Planning Grant

The First-Year Experience Seminar planning grant is a two-year 2.5-million-dollar grant starting in the Fall of 2024, focused on designing and delivering a first-year seminar embedded within each of UNO’s six colleges to support new students’ transition to college. The planning grant has two main goals:

Develop a first-year transition course integrated into UNO’s colleges.
Create an evaluation framework to assess the course’s effectiveness.

Our approach prioritizes innovative, scalable delivery of essential transitional content, ensuring access to best practices for student success for all incoming first-time students while focusing on providing an ecology of validation for students at UNO.

Potential Benefits include - (1) A unified core of transitional information provided to all students across all six UNO colleges. (2) Comprehensive, ongoing training for instructors and mentors. (3) Cross-college collaboration to establish a campus-wide support network for students. (4) Equitable access to proven success practices for all first-year students. (5) A structured evaluation model to provide insights for first-time, first-year student experiences. (6) Improved first-to-second-year retention rates and, ultimately, higher graduation rates.

This grant builds on and is based in research conducted by the Promoting At-Promise Student Success.

Students We Serve

Recent Updates

Fall 2024 Updates	Spring 2025 Updates
Received the 2-year, 2.5-million-dollar grant in July Supported hiring and training 50+ Mav Mentors (peer mentors) Enrolled 617 total students in FYE seminars during summer enrollment with 5 of 6 colleges participating. FYE Seminars Embedded in the Colleges Kicked Off Fall 2024. All students participating in FYE seminars engaged in Gallup CliftonStrengths. Recurring college coordinator meetings to discuss the delivery of the seminar and how to grow participation. Over $120,000 was provided to colleges to support the delivery of the FYE courses in colleges. Over $40,000 in stipends were paid to FYE instructors at $1,500 per seminar taught. Over $280,000 was applied to student accounts to cover the cost of the FYE seminar in their college. Beginning, Middle, and End of Semester Survey to Participants - data presented at All Campus Meeting in March 2025. 10 team members were funded for professional development at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) conference.	All six colleges are set to deliver first-year seminars with 60 total sections to be delivered for Fall of 2025 equating to nearly 1200 students. Additional Funding was granted to develop a Faculty Fellows for EOV in the Center for Faculty Excellence. 19 team members provided funding for professional development at the First-Year Experience (FYE) conference. Completed the recruitment and selection process for Mav Mentors (peer mentors) for the 2025-2026 academic year. Hiring 70 total peer mentors out of 120 applicants. All campus meeting sharing data and next steps held March 7th - Presentations found here. A Student Success through Student Support Faculty/Staff Training - March 28th. Instructor Training is April 11th, and May 2nd, 2025. - Training info can be found here.

Recent Updates

The First-Year Experience Seminars in the Colleges

MavMentors

Meet the Team