Stevens announced that it is initiating a program that will allow students to transfer to a more recent revision of their curriculum. The Stute spoke with the Schaefer School of Engineering and Sciences (SES) Director of Undergraduate Studies Sandra Clavijo to learn more.
This modification accommodates students who take a break from schooling for one or more semesters. Whether from a leave of absence, COVID-19, or a combination of factors, these students may be returning years after starting. As such, their required study plan classes might no longer be offered when they return. To accommodate this, individuals would work with their academic advisors to ask the Academic Operations and Affairs Committee (AOAC) to allow the student to transfer their required courses to a later enrollment year so that the classes they need to take are offered and up-to-date.
Recently, within SES, the Biomedical Engineering and Biology majors significantly changed their curriculum over the past few years. Because of this new curriculum, many classes offered for these two programs underwent extensive modifications. In addition, with students taking more leaves of absence because of the COVID-19 pandemic, SES looked into a potential process to make changing their academic curriculum more standard. This change, Clavijo explained, began within SES undergraduate academics and then sent to the different curriculum committees within SES. From there, other schools asked for this to be a university-wide initiative, so SES worked with all of the Associate Deans of the different schools at Stevens. After solidifying their plan, the potential process was sent to AOAC for approval.
Another part of this process was to create a system for use by the university administration. Each school’s academic advisors and undergraduate administrators can track which students would benefit from this process. Using Workday, all of the information for the administrators is in one place, making it easier and more efficient to assess who this process benefits. Additionally, the process was made available on Workday for students to apply for. This allows for a much smoother student application process that is more easily tracked and approved.
Clavijo explained that although this process is much simpler and easier to facilitate than before, everyone can still go to Workday and switch their required curriculum. For a student to go down this path, they would be approached by their academic advisor and told that this process might be beneficial to them to graduate in the least time necessary, without having to stay for extra semesters, take a lot of transfer credits, or maneuver a complex system of transferring old courses to current ones. While this new system can be helpful, there are better decisions for some students. If this may be a possible solution, academic advisors will be in touch. However, only a tiny amount of students will be affected.
