ESS 709: Transfer link

Laura Vogt:
Hi. Thank you for joining me this week on The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host, Laura Vogt, the associate director of marketing communications in the College of Engineering. This week we have Tiffany Reardon from the programs team in Engineering Student Services. Hi, Tiffany, thank you for joining us today.

Tiffany Reardon:
Hi, Laura. It’s great to be here.

Laura Vogt:
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and what your role is in Engineering Student Services?

Tiffany Reardon:
All righty. My name is Tiffany Reardon and I’m the associate director of Engineering Excellence Programs. In ESS, we have the programs team. I’m a member of the programs team and what we do in the programs team is we support students by providing a number of activities focused on academic support, on co-curricular activities, professional development workshops, and programs. In addition, we also offer a number of seminars, including the Transfer Link seminar for incoming transfer students.

Laura Vogt:
What we’re here to talk about today are these Transfer Link seminars that you have. I know that any transition to Berkeley is going to be difficult and different and it’s going to be … I hate saying difficult, because it’s not necessarily that it’s difficult for everybody, but it’s different. For transfer students, it’s even more different than the first year students, because first year students, you’ve got a lot of students coming in, you’re starting brand new with some new classes. I know that’s part of the reason why you decided that you needed a little bit more to help create a community for the transfer students.

Tiffany Reardon:
Absolutely. The premise for Transfer Link began, I believe it was in 2017. What was happening, I run a program called T-PREP, which is the transfer pre-engineering program, and that’s a program where we select 60 incoming transfer students to come to UC Berkeley for three weeks. It’s basically an onboarding program or a summer bridge-like program for transfer students. What I found is that a number of transfer students, although they wanted to do T-PREP, they weren’t available to do T-PREP, maybe because they had work obligations or maybe they were doing an internship or a summer program. I found that a lot of students that I would encounter wanted to get that T-PREP experience, but hadn’t been here during the summer. In addition, for the T-PREP students, a lot of the students that did the program enjoyed the program and wanted more, so my thought was, “Why don’t I create a first year seminar?” We have first year seminars for freshmen. Why not have one for transfer students in the College of Engineering? Thus, Transfer Link was born.

Laura Vogt:
How is Transfer Link something that’s every week or is it only for part of the semester?

Tiffany Reardon:
Transfer Link is a class, it is a one unit class, a seminar class, E 198, and it is specifically for incoming College of Engineering transfer students. Now, we are pretty inclusive, in that I’ve had students that are chemical engineering and they’ve been in Transfer Link. And then of course, the Letters and Sciences CS students, they’re more than welcome to join the community as well. It’s really an opportunity to onboard students to create a community of other transfer students, so you can meet other transfer students, so you can get acclimated to the university, and essentially things that you will already be doing, you’ll be able to do so in a class setting and get a unit for it.

Laura Vogt:
Is it different themes every week? Are there a lot of assignments? What’s the workload that goes into it?

Tiffany Reardon:
That’s an excellent question. I worked with engineering students for 23 years and I know the last thing engineering students want is more assignments and more things like that. The assignments that we have in Transfer Link, these are things that you’re going to do anyways and you should be doing anyways. Creating a resume, updating your resume, creating a LinkedIn, researching employers that hire engineers in your major, finding out what upper division technical courses, finding out about how to get involved in research, forming study groups, going to professors’ office hours, these are all things that students will be doing, should be doing, and we’re just here to basically get students connected to those things. I think a lot of students come into Berkeley very excited about Berkeley, very excited about their major, but there comes a point where you get offered so many things. It’s very, very hard to choose.
I always use the analogy of a buffet table. You have this big buffet table and you have all these clubs and you have all these opportunities, but what do you do? What makes the most sense for you? As a transfer student, we spend a lot of time helping transfer students really assess what’s out there, what’s available, and how does this connect with their overall goals? Now, some students might not know what their overall goals are. Maybe you’re in a major mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering is very, very broad, there’s a lot of applications and concentrations in mechanical engineering, so our job really is to expose students to what’s available and then help guide them to what piques their interest and what ultimately is next for them, whether it be grad school, industry, or maybe they want to get involved in the startup world.

Laura Vogt:
How do students, do they have to apply for the class? Is there anything like a code that they need or anything like that?

Tiffany Reardon:
No, it is a hundred percent open. Any incoming transfer student can take the class. We have two offerings to accommodate schedules, so students should only enroll in one of the offerings because if they enroll in both, it’s going to be a rerun, unless they really, really like class, but I probably wouldn’t recommend that they enroll in both classes. We do have two offerings for students, and as many students would like to take the class, I would love to have them in the class. We’re going to have a really fun semester. You’re going to meet a lot of students, not only current incoming students, you’re going to meet a lot of previous transfer students, you’re going to meet some alums, you’re going to meet faculty, and you’re just going to meet people that are here to support you and make sure that you excel and succeed. I think the class gets better every year, because we’re all about optimization here at Berkeley, and that isn’t limited to research in the lab. It’s also in our courses.

Laura Vogt:
You’ve talked about making it so that the class fits into your schedule. Do you think that one class will be more heavily one major than another, because of required courses that they’re having to take?

Tiffany Reardon:
Oh, that’s an excellent question. I think that some of our majors tend to be bigger. Certainly, mechanical and EECS tend to be our biggest majors. I would suspect that you’ll have a lot of classmates that are in those majors, but unless that there is a conflicting class, which is precisely why we have the two majors, one of which will take place Tuesdays from 2 to 3 and the other will take place Wednesdays from 11 to noon, we strategically selected those times because we wanted to try to find a time that didn’t conflict with the 61As, the E7s, the classes that a lot of our students will be taking. We hope to capture as many transfer students as possible so they can be together in this Transfer Link. I also think we’re trying to really replicate that community that our transfer students are used to at the community college, that element of community and working with other students. We want it to be tailored to the transfer experience.

Laura Vogt:
I like the idea that you have, past students are able to come back and share their knowledge with the new students there, too, because there might be resources that you aren’t even aware of that somebody found or something that you didn’t think would be a resource that a past student is like, “No, this is something that made everything a thousand times easier.”

Tiffany Reardon:
Absolutely. The first day of class we say, “Hey, next year don’t be surprised if you’re here talking to students,” and students are excited to do that. I think one of the things that I particularly love about transfer students is that transfer students, when you meet another transfer student, there’s this instant affinity. You understand the transfer student experience. You understand how exciting it is to be accepted into your dream school, but at the same time, you understand that that transition is difficult. Many, many of our students are not only transferring and acclimating to a new school. A lot of our students are relocating. They’re moving. Maybe they’re moving out for the first time. Maybe they have lived at home. Maybe they had a living situation. Maybe they worked. They’re giving all of that up and giving up a lot of familiarity to pursue, I would say, one of the most difficult degrees. Engineering is not an easy degree, and I say that because of the time. The time spent on problems and working on problems is very, very time-consuming, and we want students to take care of themselves and we want students to be efficient. We want students to be efficient when they study and we want to connect them to other students and we want to connect them to resources, so that they will have a successful transition.

Laura Vogt:
I like the idea that you’re not only working on academic resources, that you’re working on helping them get an internship or helping them find jobs and things along those lines as well.

Tiffany Reardon:
Absolutely. One could spend endless amounts of time looking for opportunities. We give it to them. Each week we start off with announcements. “Here are some things that might be of interest to you. Here are some things that you can apply to. Here are some things specific to transfer students. Here are some things specific to engineering students.” We also have a lot of fun, too. I think we have fun in the class. Every year, it’s a tradition. I’m really big on traditions. Every year, and I guess I’ll have to do it twice this year, every year I quiz the students and I say, “I’m going to bring you donuts,” and so I bring the students donuts and they get to pick where they want donuts from. It’s just a fun thing.

Laura Vogt:
That’s great. I really like that you get to build this relationship with the students, as you’re getting to know them through the year.

Tiffany Reardon:
Absolutely. Not only do they get to know us, I’ve had students that have come to me and have said, “I’m a first semester student. I have this opportunity. I don’t really know how to approach professors for letters of recommendation. Can you help me that with that?” or “I don’t really know how to utilize office hours, especially if I’m in a class with hundreds of students,” and so we help students with that as well.

Laura Vogt:
That’s great. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure that we add?

Tiffany Reardon:
One of the things that we do that I think is pretty unique in Transfer Link is we give students a group project. The group project allows them to work with other students to focus on an area of engineering that they’re interested in and they become experts on that area. Some of the presentations that students have done have been quite impressive and students learn a lot. Again, it’s something that students would do anyways and they’re doing it for a class and they really become experts in these sub-disciplines of engineering.

Laura Vogt:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on today and telling us more about Transfer Link and we’ll make sure that we have links to the courses and link to more information on our webpage and in the newsletter. If anyone’s looking for that, we’ll definitely have that available for you to click on. Thank you, Tiffany, for being here today.

Tiffany Reardon:
Thank you, and I look forward to meeting you all in Transfer Link this fall.

Laura Vogt:
Thank you everyone for tuning in to The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer, and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye.