Three residence halls allocated just for engineering students at Southern Illinois University by Alexis Boudreau
The National Science Foundation in September granted SIUC $1.2 million to help fund the endeavor. Chrisman said more than half of the grant would go toward funding the peer mentors’ salaries.
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Nicklow said there would be approximately five students per mentor, and the mentor would attend at least one class per week with the students, along with providing tutoring and guidance.
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“The whole purpose is for them to interact with one another,” Lorentz said. “They will be able to live, learn and study together. It will enhance the student experience.”
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The new program will also involve faculty mentors, free tutoring available in the halls four or five nights a week and 36 practicing engineers who will periodically speak to students.
Some of the ideas sound good. I am skeptical of the advantage for completely separate dorms, but I believe in experiments so I like the idea of trying this. It will be interesting to see the results of this effort.
November 1st, 2006 at 11:57 am
This is a very discouraging story. “Theme halls” are a very poor educational idea, as I argue here:
http://collegiateway.org/news/2005-theme-halls
What these folks are responding to is the collapse of the social fabric of the campus, but holy cow, for 1.2 million I could set up an entire residential college and run it for 50 years. What an enormous waste of money.