Episode 8: Kate Lehman, Executive Director of the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition

Key quotes

Shonta Sellers: Welcome back to spur of the moment, the podcast for the curious. I'm your host, Sean Sellers, and this is the place where genuine questions spark honest reactions and conversations that just might pique your curiosity. Joining me today is the executive director of the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and students in Transition, Kate Lehman. 

W hat we're going to talk about today is more the NRC part, the National Resource Center part, which is where you are really the cornerstone and the knowledge base for so let's just jump right on in and tell everybody who you are, and we'll just slide on into the conversation. Okay.

Kate Lehman: You're right. Lots of folks don't don't necessarily know the the NRC or if they do know us, maybe they only know about our big conference, the First-Year Experience Conference. I think many people in the division and, even even like nationally and internationally, that's really what the National Resource Center is known for. And we are located in the same department as U101, so we share a really important I don't know where like a sister relationship with them.

But our mission is a little different than the rest of the division. So whereas the rest of the division is really focused on serving students, the NRC serves educators. So our role is to conduct research, provide resources like the name implies, put on conferences and other professional development events so that folks both here at USC and external to USC can benefit from that knowledge base about how to best support students in their key transitions.

And when we say transitions, we're talking about those really big inflection points that happen in a student's college career where they might need some extra support. And so, the one we're best known for is the first year experience. And I think the NRC contributes to that number one ranking because we contribute to USC's reputation. But the first year experience isn't the only key transition as students go through in college.

There are there are many others, obviously, the college to career, college to post-graduate life, whatever that looks like. That's a big transition. Students who are transfer students, that's a huge transition. Things like students changing their major academic recovery. Those are all, you know, key shifts that happen in a student's college career. And our job at the NRC is to, produce knowledge and provide resources so that the folks who are supporting students through those key transitions are ready to do that.

SS: Well, let's talk a little bit about one of the things you spoke about, and that's transfer students. I know we often focus all of our energies around the new incoming undergraduate students. First time on campus freshmen experience the whole nine, but there is an influx of transfer students. But the NRC has made a wonderful acquisition over the past couple of months. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

KL: I would love to. We're really excited. So our longtime collaborators, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students, better known in the broader higher ed community as NISTS. They have been around for 20 or so years, and they were most recently located the University of North Georgia. And in many ways, they were sort of our counterpart.

They they did similar work, but they really focused in exclusively on transfer students. And so while the NRC always did some work on transfer students, we really deferred to their expertise. They also had a national conference focused on transfer students. And unfortunately, last fall they lost their funding support from the University of North Georgia. And so they were looking for a new home.

SS: And you celebrated and talked a little bit about the NISTS acquisition at the FYE conference, which you're just fresh off the plane from. How was it received to your audience there?

KL: I think people were really excited. The folks who come to FYE often think about students, like you said, as like the incoming students. But the reality of students who go to college today is that many of them are technically transfer students, whether they attended a community college for a semester and then transferred, or even if they took a couple courses in high school. Many of them are coming to us with some other, educational experience, and so I think, a lot of them have transfer on their minds.

SS: One other thing that you all provide access for us is publications. There are publications that are being written all the time. So for the curious individuals, we've got two new publications, two recent publications that have been released. The first one is the National Survey on the First-Year Experience: Contemporary Strategies to Support Student Success.

KL: We tried something different this year. So the the National Survey on the First-Year Experience is really like the the key research report that comes out of the NRC. And it's actually only the second time that the survey has focused on the broader first-year experience. So historically, the survey focused really exclusively on first-year seminars, which is a cornerstone of first-year experience, but of course, there's a lot more to it then than just the seminar.

And so in 2017, the NRC pivoted and started asking about other components of the first-year experience. So this was the second time we had this broader survey focused on first-year experience. And historically, the NRC has published that report under a paywall, and so we made the report open access.

And then we also have a report that was just released while we were at FYE that focuses and celebrates in fact, the the experiences of students at HBCUs, so historically Black colleges and universities. And this was the outgrowth of a grant that our scholar in residence, Dr. Jamil D Johnson, who is faculty in the College of Education, he had gotten a grant from NASA and the Advising Success Network, to really focus in and highlight first-year experience efforts that are happening at HBCUs.

SS: I am a graduate from an HBCU. I'm a proud Aggie from North A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina. And when I heard about that particular publication, I was so excited I could not wait. And it is on my list of things to read. I know Dr. Jamil, and he's phenomenal. He's a great writer and he loves talking about this stuff, so I am looking forward to reading that to see if it touched on all of the things that I experienced in my HBCU experience. I have three daughters, and all three of them went to a historically Black college or university.

SS: In the fall, you mentioned that the Students In Transition conference will come up, but then you're going to do FYE annually again.

KL: Yep in February of 2027 we are in Orlando, so we've been saying we're taking our warm vibes and our FYE magic to the most magical place on Earth. Orlando also a place that FYE has consistently been held over the years. It is always a popular location for folks, especially in February. Our colleagues coming from the northeast are often digging themselves out of snow to join us.