“New School New You”: The UAB Transfer Student Podcast Halle Baldwin, Department of Psychology Jeremy Chu, Department of Neuroscience Ryleigh Fleming, Karishma Parbhoo, Diana Bucio, Sarah Adkins-Jablonsky, & Samiksha Raut, Department of Biology Cinnamin Cross, Biomedical Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham Almost half of the students in higher education in the United States begin their journey at a community college. Transfer students are often first-generation college students belonging to underrepresented minority groups (URM), and/or are from low socio-economic backgrounds. Their unique pathway to a successful college completion is more than often accompanied by a temporary decrease in their academic performance due to academic differences once they transfer from a two-year to a fouryear institution, known “transfer shock” (D’Amico & Chapman, 2018). This transfer shock is further enhanced by lack of social support systems at the transferring institutions. These adverse experiences have shown to impact a student’s sense of belonging and further retention, especially for STEM majors. Thus, it is imperative that institutions of higher education should help address this critical issue related to transfer students’ needs. The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), is a public research university located in the heart of Birmingham, and is Alabama’s largest degree-granting university with more than half of its students enrolled in STEM related programs. Moreover, UAB is a preferred destination for transfer students from nearby twoyear institutions constituting 11% of the overall annual enrollment (College Transfer, 2021). Therefore, targeted strategies focused on retention and graduation of the transfer students are important to enhance the mission of undergraduate education at UAB. While UAB has transfer resources, few are student-run or highlight firstgeneration, URM, or low Socio-Economic Status (SES) student perspectives. Considering that a recent survey suggests that the audience for podcasts is at an all-time high with podcast playing in 50% of U.S. homes, and 48% of the podcast listenership are college aged adults (Winn, 2021), podcasts represent an ideal platform for broadcasting peer-to-peer conversations to help mitigate adverse transfer student experiences. In 2020, an Associate Professor in the UAB Department of Biology (S.R), drawing from vast experiences implementing and assessing Service-Learning projects (Adkins-Jablonsky et al., 2021; Mendoza et al. 2020);) and working with one-on-one transfer students in large enrollment courses, envisioned creating a podcast that summarized the insights and experiences of transfer students to serve as a guidepost for future and in-coming transfer students. S.R. recruited seven undergraduates across four STEM disciplines at UAB to establish the podcast series “New School New You”, accessible at the following web-link: https://anchor.fm/ newschoolnewyou. This undergraduate student team recruited transfer students, particularly those who were first-generation, URM, or low SES students to be interviewed to share their transfer stories. The following logistical workflow was established for “New School New You” and thus may be of benefit to other educators and stakeholders seeking to establish an institutional podcast.
Logistics 1. Include students on the podcast team who reflect the identities of the transfer students - The recruited student team (including authors H.B., J.C., R.F., D.B., and C.C) all as allies of this student community. 2. Mapping content stream - To prepare the episodes, the student team worked with the faculty advisor (S.R) and transfer students to identify literature and perspectives that led to assembling topics, creating a robust question set, and finalizing the content stream. For examples of these episodes, see “2 Example Episodes” below. Materials were assembled in a shared Google Drive that included folders for episodes/script writing, podcast image art, audio introduction, and audio recordings. Students practiced interviewing with each other and the faculty advisor as an informal training, and all team meetings were held virtually.
Album cover for podcast series “New School New You” by Karishma Parbhoo
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