The University of Redlands has a longstanding tradition of service and opportunity, with many a spotlight on activities like volunteering, studying abroad and conducting research. As of this year, however, there has been a new push by the Dean of the College of Art and Science to make a more united focus towards the many unique aspects of a Redlands educational experience.
What is the Core Four?
The Core Four is the name of an initiative by the CAS Dean’s office, encompassing four significant opportunities that can be found at Redlands: community service learning (CSL), undergraduate research, career internships and study away.
“We think these four are transformative, deeply immersive and require interactions with others,” CAS Dean Justin Rose explained. “The ‘doing’ part is the students engaging in that, but also it’s on us to remove barriers and let people know about resources that exist in those opportunities.”
The Core Four was created after the Dean’s Office looked into patterns in Redlands alumni responses about what experiences had the greatest impacts in their working lives.
Incorporating the Core Four into the student experience
Community service learning is a key part of the Redlands experience, with students required to complete 80 hours of community service before graduation – and many doing far more than that. However, opportunities such as internship and independent study as part of a student’s class planning might not be considered at all, whether it’s because students don’t know that they’re able to add them as classes to their registration or because the process is unclear. Studying away, although done by over 48% of students as given by the Study Away Office’s statistics page, is often also not possible for students for various reasons such as financial need or class scheduling difficulties.
The main goals behind creating the Core Four is to help students learn about the options available to them, as well as bring to light the stories of those who took on these experiences, and showing how they can assist in a student’s future career. Being able to better identify problems in the system is also something that the CAS office aims to work on while streamlining the systems involved with opening up these opportunities.
“We know that one of the key ingredients to successful education experience is the advising relationship, and making sure advisors are well trained and have all the resources they need. With Core Four, we are beginning to have conversations with all advisors so that they all know about such resources,” Dean Rose said. “Part of the reason is that students don’t always know about all the resources so we need to make sure that faculty advisors know.”
Conversation guides and recordkeeping resources are some of the ways in which advisors assist in implementing the Core Four. The guide, called the Engaged Learning Plan, serves as a means for keeping both advisors and advisees up-to-date with any goals a student wants to achieve during their time at the university. The Office of the CAS Dean is also aiming to provide more information on study abroad programs or CSL opportunities that would potentially be highly beneficial for students.
“If an advisor tells a student, ‘Hey I think it’s going to be really important for you to have an undergraduate research experience in your junior year because I know you’re heading on to become a research scientist in grad school,’ that’s a great plan. But where is it written?” the Associate Dean of Curricular Affairs, Dr. Nate Cline, asked. “Is everyone going to forget about it in the next advising session? We need the tools and so I think advisors want their students to have all of these things.”
Rose also talked about barriers like financial and timely graduation concerns in regard to study abroad and finding ways to break those down. The Office of Career and Professional Development, in working with the CAS Dean’s Office, has also begun supporting the Core Four initiative through events like their weekly Lunch and Learn sessions and partial restructuring of its advising systems. They have also focused on incorporating more career planning into the student curriculum so students have a better sense of the job market and how to navigate it after graduating.
There is also a new course that was offered this spring to help students use what they learned from their study abroad experiences, similar to CSL courses.
Getting the word out
The Core Four initiative was unveiled during New Student Orientation this year by the Office of the Dean.
“How has that changed you? What are you taking with you as you complete your studies? How do you tell your story to external audiences? How do you tell that story to grad schools or answers to interview questions? When students get asked questions in interviews, it may not be the case that the first thing they think of is their experience traveling Europe or their time serving folks in the Inland Empire,” Cline said.
He continued by pointing out the class projects that students worked on during their college years, as well as how internships could be used as college credit and individualized study as honors projects. They were, as Cline described them, transformative and immersive experiences that could aid one’s future career.
Cline and Rose also highlighted how the Core Four opportunities offer more personalized education and are not exclusively limited to top students. Another goal of theirs is to have the wider community get involved by attending student presentations or events that highlight various experiences.
The Core Four — community service learning, study abroad, internships and individualized study — are all options for students wanting to maximize their time at Redlands. Rose and Cline both hope that acknowledging these key components of a unique and accessible Redlands education, will enable students to take advantage of planning for these opportunities and graduate with a wider view of themselves and of the world.
Kae Yeoh is a senior majoring in music performance and minoring in history. She has been a reporter with the newspaper since her first year at Redlands and enjoys watching documentaries, drinking tea, and listening to pop-punk and Asian rock.
