III. Build on the Freshman Foundation The freshman experience must be consolidated by extending its principles into the following years. Inquiry-based learning, collaborative experience, writing and speaking expectations need to characterize the whole of a research university education. Those students who enter the research university later than the freshman year need to be integrated smoothly into this special atmosphere. After the freshman student is initiated into the life of the research university through a program that is innovative and exciting, the gains will be lost if the rest of the university experience does not match. Moving from a stimulating freshman seminar and an integrated program back into courses that seem unrelated, with requirements that do not evoke the newly-awakened spirit of research, would be dispiriting and disillusioning. So it is incumbent on the university to carry the reforms to every part of the curriculum. This report does not address the issues of curricular change but rather the questions of how subject matter is presented and how intellectual growth is stimulated. The goal of making baccalaureate students participants in the research process requires faculties to reexamine their methods of delivering education, to ask how, in every course, students can become active rather than passive learners. That task, undertaken seriously, will produce many innovations suited to different disciplinary circumstances; the changes need to include greater expectations of writing and speaking, more active problem-solving, and more collaboration among baccalaureate students, graduate students, and faculty. Long-term Mentorship In a successful research experience, a relationship of trust and respect exists among the members of a team; shared goals and community often follow. Universities cannot expect that close personal relationships will or should exist between every student and the faculty members to whom that student has been exposed. But every student at a research university should be able to feel that some faculty member knows and appreciates that student’s situation and progress and is ready to help that progress by setting standards to be met and by offering advice, encouragement, and criticism. To be effective, this kind of mentoring relationship needs to be created early and maintained when possible throughout a student’s program. Such a relationship should go beyond the routine suggestions about choice of courses that many departments consider to be "advising"; it requires patience and commitment from the faculty member, but the relationships built can be mutually rewarding. Integrating Transfer Students Research universities, particularly the state-supported universities, very often accept into their upper-class majors large numbers of students who have begun their educations elsewhere, at community colleges, at liberal arts colleges, or at other universities. It is not unusual for students to attend more than one institution before settling. Their freshman experience is over, for better or for worse, but they need to be integrated into the atmosphere of the research university and given as much as possible of the kind of inquiry-based experience that they missed. Special seminars or similar courses for transfer students would make up a major part of the deficit. Recommendations: The inquiry-based learning, collaborative efforts, and expectations for writing and speaking that are part of the freshman experience need to be carried throughout the program. Thoughtful and attentive advising and mentoring should integrate major fields with supporting courses so that programs become integrated wholes rather than collections of disparate courses. Mentorships should begin as early as possible and should be maintained, whenever possible, throughout a student’s academic career. New transfer students need to be integrated into the research experience with special seminars or similar courses comparable to the freshman seminar.

SIGNS OF CHANGE University Case Study Junior Independent Work and Senior Thesis University Princeton All undergraduates at Princeton must conduct independent research or creative work during the junior year and submit a Junior Paper, which then becomes the basis for the required Senior Thesis.