Make the end of college as promising as the BeginningThe Senior Year Experience is the long-awaited sequel to the 1989 classic book The Freshman Year Experience. Like its highly acclaimed predecessor, this important book fills a gap in the literature on the topic of student transition. The Senior Year Experience offers a blueprint of the best ideas and strategies for ensuring that the end of the college experience is as promising as the beginning.
Editors John N. Gardner and Gretchen Van der Veer provide a wealth of information for enriching college students' final year with courses and programs designed to give meaning to their undergraduate experience. They also offer practical strategies for improving the passage from senior year into the workforce or graduate school. The Senior Year Experience features original contributions from expert scholars and practitioners in the field. They reveal the criteria for creating effective capstone courses and offer suggestions on how to design capstone experiences that will ensure success. The authors also outline many ways to enhance the citizenship development of graduating seniors, including integrating service learning into the general education program, establishing community centers, implementing leadership programs, and embracing diversity and multiculturalism on campus. Drawing on exemplary programs from a wide variety of institutions, the book is filled with illustrative examples of curricular and cocurricular approaches that help seniors develop the skills necessary to succeed in graduate school and the professional workplace. In addition to outlining the necessary information on how to develop and implement senior year programs, the authors tackle the thorny issues of how to create new programs in times of scarce resources.