What are the key issues faced by first year undergraduates - Essay Example

?What are the key issues faced by first year undergraduates? This essay will scrutinize the hardship and challenges those in first year encounter at university. It point to the students’ academic, personal, social, and environmental integration in the university scenery as the main determinant of student retention. Therefore, the issues that this easy intend to discussed are in terms of personal challenges, academic challenges, environmental challenges and social challenges. Every issue will present basic idea with a practical example. Moreover, the essay will further detail these issues that students in first year face as well as the reasons why these issues have become an obstacle for their retention and integration in the university. To begin with, Personal challenges that first year students face at the University might cover several challenges but let us talk about loneliness. Loneliness is usually an emotional feeling that arises when someone feels that she/he has been left out by friends, usually in an entirely new environment. In addition, this is a quite common problem faced by most students in their first year at Universities when they leave their families so as to seek abroad studies in higher institution of learning. A practical and a classic example is when these first year students feel Home and lovesick which normally happens when they are missing their family or someone so special to them in life, who is far away from them. Fortunately, this sort of emotional feeling can only last for few weeks or months after which they recover from it, as they will meet more friends in due time. Besides Personal challenges, there are environmental challenges first year student face that that threaten their retention and integration into the university system. Learning in a totally new environment is not that easy as one may think, as it demands adaptation to that new Environment which is not an easy task for everyone. The mode of learning and teaching methods may be different from those that these first year students at the University may have used while still in high schools. For instance, the using the library catalogue is a new idea to most students in first year. Additionally, there can be sluggish learning progression in a too crowded and noisy environment for the student in first year at the University. A productive and a successful learning outcome requires a conducive and private environment and therefore most students in first year at the University find difficulties in learning in crowded environment, since it associate with numerous negative impacts; for example, lose interest in learning processes and lose of concentration. However, after a couple of semesters, the students in first year at the University need to have been adapted and familiarized with the system if at all they are eager to learn and not pull out from the university. The third issue is educational challenges these student in first year at the University face. This issue is always of concern as well to a good number of first year students. Academic side in institutions of higher learning are highly professional than High Schools contrary to what the majority of first year students may expect, therefore, a good number of them are never serious enough with their time management. First year students are devoid of efficient time management skill which simply explains how a person plan and allocate her/his daily activities in accordance to time available. At times, first year students lose opportunities to obtain additional marks in their final assessment simply because they never planned well for their time at the university (Gibney, Murpy & O’sullivan, 2011). For example, they might fail to attend or be late to attend to labs and tutorial, which implies they will lose marks. Moreover, procrastination is always a toxic attitude towards time management. This attitude is referring to the behavior of keeping tasks like homework and assignment to be done in a later date. Consequently, this attitude of University`s first year students may result in their overall performance to be of a low standard as it lead to pilling of workload. Moreover, making use of University resources economically may also be a great challenge for the students in first year. Universities may have diverse resources to assist students in their studies. Classic examples of the resources include library and computers, which can be very challenging for the students in first year to use. Majority of libraries in Universities normally use catalogues with the support of computers to trace books as well as other resources in their library. Unfortunately, most students in first year are not equipped with the know-how that is required to utilize the library catalogue. In addition, they do not have internet research skills needed to do researches, especially those students who are computer illiterate. However, a good number of Universities finally realized some of these issues and started to launch computer related courses to students in first year. For example, in 2010, University of South Pacific eventually introduces a course referred to as Information and Communication to the students in first year. Lastly, despite Universities being advance learning grounds and more entertaining, which can cause freedom to any sort of possibilities in life, it present in it a social challenge to first year students. Human beings are social being and the notion to “cultivate friendship”, will form the first to issues prior to any other social challenges. Majority of students in first year at the University are ever happy to making new friends and trying out new things (Gibney, Murpy & O’sullivan, 2011). They definitely fall victims of peer pressure as some of them will try to smoke or drink for the first time, especially when the friends they meet are influential in their character. Some of these first year students soon become experienced drug users and even opt to pull out of university. Another social issues that the student in first year face is social night programs. Universities sometimes do run entertainment nights to entertain the students, which is not a bad idea. However, such programs provide conducive environment to easily confuse first year students by diverting their interest to clubbing and drinking rather than educational activities. Those programs always function as the venue of orientating first year students to drinking and sometime these innocent and naive first year students finally frequent Clubs and occasionally end up in jail. Take for example, the incident where a first year student was found outside Suva club very drunk just after Vodafone arena Social night that was organized by University of South Pacific. It compelled the police to take the student to jail spent a night in their custody. To conclude, it is important to be aware that majority of the student in first year normally face difficulties at the Universities. Getting well acquainted with the type of situations, issues and pressures students are most likely to experience at any time need to assist one to understand what's happening to these first year students and know ways to best help them. This will assist in retaining these students in the university despite all the issues they are facing and not to pull out of university. List of references GIBNEY, A, M, MURPY, F and O’SULLIVAN, S. (2011). “The first semester of university life; ‘will I be able to manage it at all?’ Read More