The first year university experience is inherently linked to student retention and success. First year students are often unprepared for the academic requirements of university, which can result in stress, poor student outcomes and low student retention rates. Although there is considerable literature on the challenges students face when…

Interdisciplinary education offers a collaborative approach to multifaceted topics, such as environmental sustainability. In this article, we present the conceptual framework and lessons learned from a team-taught course, entitled Sustainability, Energy, and the Green Economy (SEGE). Faculty from the departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology…

Three faculty members from three different professional disciplines outline strategies to engage first-year students in a team-taught, multidisciplinary first-year experience course. The theme of the discussed section is titled food for thought...and action. Assignments are grounded in theories of cooperative and experiential learning. Tentative…

Responding to changes in the demands on the country's science and engineering research community since the end of the Cold War, the National Science Foundation (NSF) introduced the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in 1997 to encourage science and engineering Ph.D. programs to provide their students with…