“We knew that there was a high correlation between first-term performance and five-year graduation rates, so we concentrated on front loading, so to speak,” says Moore. “We completely revamped ‘Challenge,’ which was our pre-freshman bridge program, and added a transition program for our other entry programs, which were our incoming Dual Degree transfers and our new graduate students.”
The issue of not just surviving but thriving is a challenge for both schools and students. In order to address this performance problem, the OMED staff instituted the second component of their success model. An executive on loan from IBM crunched the numbers and discovered an interesting historical trend.
“What we found was that after about the one-and-a-half year mark, whatever your cumulative GPA was, your term GPA from that point forward did not fluctuate more than about .25 in any direction,” says Moore. “We called this point our ‘rut year.’ So to this day, we still put our emphasis on the first year and a half by being very invasive into the lives of our students.”
Those who have been through the engineering program at Georgia Tech point to two men as key figures in their academic success — Dr. Gary S. May, chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Dr. William J. Wepfer, of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. According to Hayes, Wepfer and the other graduate coordinators are the engines that drive the university’s minority initiatives.
“We talk about top down and bottom up, but at the end of the day it comes down to faculty and their demonstrated commitment to the effort,” says Moore. “The bottom line is that if you don’t have a couple of distinguished faculty members in the trenches, nothing will happen.”
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