Still Deciding

(upbeat music) When an undeclared student comes on campus, we wanna help calm them down. So we as life coaches will meet with them to talk about what some of those next steps in life are. You know they come in with a lot of uncertainty about what they want to major in, what are their career path options, and we want to help them explore those options. Research shows that declaring your major even as late as junior year doesn't actually slow down graduation. Our life coaches are gonna work with students to make sure they're meeting all their general education requirements in those first two years and exploring some of those options within their elective options. [Brady] We do that through different learning assessments that we have. We have the Strengths Finder Assessment. We've got the Strong Interest Inventory. Those are two of the biggest ones that we use to help students figure out what some of those interests might be so they can start to explore some of those class options. Students are very stressed about it. They're saying I'm in college, I should know what I wanna do, I should know what major I should go into. But we're here to let them know that it is okay if they don't know what they wanna do. Again that's what their life coach is here for, to help them go through this process and make sure they have a smooth transition into the university. About 25% of our students at Maryville change their major. So being undeclared is really no big deal. In fact, it helps our life coaches identify you from the very start that they need to be helping you with a lot of those assessments and problem-solving techniques. So when a student comes to me and says I'm undeclared, I don't know what I wanna do, I say great, you know let's talk about that. And because there's a ton of possibility there. In addition to the amazing assessments that we do with students in working with them one-on-one, we also connect students with faculty members. Faculty members are oftentimes experts in their field. The students can sit down with those faculty and kinda really dig into the major and into the program and really figure out what they wanna do. As a life coach, we take a holistic and individualized approach when we work with our students. So we do academic coaching, career coaching, personal and professional development. So we are very hands-on with our students. We don't just want to create scholars who can be effective in the classroom, but we want you to have the soft skills that you need to be successful. I had a student that was undeclared during the fall semester and during the entire semester we talked about exactly what he wanted to do. So we did the Strong Interest Inventory. We invest in what he was strong in, so what was his strengths, what did he enjoy doing on his own time, and he decided that he wanted to do cyber security. So as his life coach, I made sure that he was connected to different resources across campus. So I did connect him with the director of cyber security. He was able to meet with him and learn even more about the major and he has been in the major for a semester now and absolutely loves it. We're really excited to talk about our outcome rate this year which was 97%. Which means that 97% of our graduates this year have landed a job or have enrolled in continuing education. That means even our undeclared students have declared and found an occupation that suits them. With the culture here at Maryville, the life coach model, the interactions that you get to have with faculty and other staff, you as an undeclared student can thrive. We're gonna help go, we're gonna guide you, we're gonna get you to where you want to be even if you don't know it right now. (upbeat music)