In the early 1990s a new program, the first-year experience, at Kalamazoo College was launched in order to development a more concentrated focus on how students began their education. Dr. Zaide Pixley, a long-time, part-time Associate Professor of Music, was hired to direct the new program. No one could have predicted the phenomenal success of this program or its profound effect, not only on our first-year students, but on the entire college culture.

With the help of the Dean of Students staff and faculty in the English Department, Dr. Pixley began to reorganize the orientation program and extend the more focused attention on new students to the entire first year rather than just the orientation period. Programs offered during orientation week were redesigned to focus on the dimensions of student growth in hopes that students would develop lifelong learning, career readiness, intercultural understanding, leadership and social responsibility so that they could better understand the goals of a Kalamazoo College education. She also added a common reading for the summer with a discussion of the reading to be held during the orientation week. Thus the orientation program began to tie together more deliberately the education the College wanted to impart to the students and to give entering students an opportunity to develop more self-confidence as they began their college careers. Under the leadership of Dr. Pixley, the first-year seminars were moved to the fall quarter, and actually started during orientation week and with agreement from the Provost and the faculty, all faculty would participate in the first-year experience through advising and/or teaching a seminar.

She has also established a stronger advisor-training program and provides the advisors with excellent advising materials so that faculty knows how to work most effectively within the developmental advising model and to be even more effective with our students. Additionally, Dr. Pixley has also established a very successful peer leader program as a part of the first-year experience with upperclassmen applying for the opportunity to work with a seminar and becoming an active part of the advising team working with entering students from orientation through the first year.

Dr. Pixley is a skilled administrator who easily crosses the line that is too frequently drawn between academic life and the student development life of a college. She understands the perspective of each area, and through her carefully constructed program one can see more clearly each area’s contribution to the other and the strengthening of the total educational process for our students. Dr. Pixley continually seeks new ideas about programs that work for first-year students and Kalamazoo College sees stronger, confident and more competent students emerging from their first-year program as a result.