Episode 9.5 Transcript

CSU, Chico’s College of Humanities & Fine Arts Success Studio

Time: 16:02

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

students, chico state, college, question, campus, studio, advising, resources, success, humanities, episode, fine arts, listeners, career, advisor, podcasts, bit, alumni, share, email address

SPEAKERS

He-Lo Ramirez, Kylee Sharp, joshuah whittinghill, Teresa Hernandez, Introduction Music

He-Lo Ramirez 00:01

Heytanayem nikki yam sa He-Lo nikki Mechoopda Maidu. Hello everyone. My name is He-Lo and I’m a Mechoopda Maidu. We acknowledge and are mindful that Chico State stands on lands that were originally occupied by the first people in this area, the Mechoopda. And we recognize their distinctive spiritual relationship with this land and the waters that run through campus. We are humbled that our campus resides upon sacred lands that have sustained the Mechoopda people for centuries, and continue to do so today.

Introduction Music 01:11

Introduction Music

Teresa Hernandez 01:12

Welcome everyone. My name is Teresa and I’m excited to welcome our listeners to our second official mini episode for today. To Get Started.

Teresa Hernandez 01:23

We are first generation one of many. Our mission is to create an archive of discussions with and about first generation student experiences in and out of the classroom. We hope to continue raising awareness and understanding provide voice for students and alum as well as present resources or faculty, staff and students working for and collaborating with first generation students. So of course, it cannot be doing this by myself. I’d like to now introduce my co host, Joshuah Whittinghill. Hi, Josh.

joshuah whittinghill 01:49

Hi, Teresa. Thanks. Good to see you again. We have on today’s a great day the sun came out again. And we’ve been on an active role of just scheduling a number of podcasts and getting to record more back to back and in closer proximity of each other. Quite often we have a two or three week break between recording. So this is great. And I have to laugh, even because in my mind, I heard what you said, this is our second official mini or point five podcasts. But the funny thing is, it’s our third one, because we did one just a couple days ago with our artists, which is going to be a point five episode, but it may not feel like it because it was like 55 minutes long. But it’s going to be officially it’s going to be officially Episode 8.5 that one so it didn’t turn into a mini episode. It was a wonderful and it’s a great sort of lead in right leading podcast, as we’re going to be talking about humanities and Fine Arts today a little bit, especially on the campus of Chico State. And so as with tradition, we have a quote to start the day out before we introduce our guest and the quote today is from E.M. Forster. The arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken something as mysterious and capricious, as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act. And so our guest I like to introduce is Kylee Sharp. She serves as the college advising and retention specialist for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She is a proud alumna of Chico State with a bachelor’s degree in psychology as well as a master’s degree in higher education from Sacramento State. Riley has been a professional academic advisor for six years, and is looking forward to spending the rest of her career serving the campus community and improving the educational experience for all students outside of work. Highly enjoy spending time with her family. I can Bidwell and crafting. But welcome, Kylee.

Kylee Sharp 03:50

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on today.

joshuah whittinghill 03:53

Yeah, I’m glad you made it. And like we were talking before, you are one of our first guests in a know a new sort of series of point five episodes coming up to highlight resources around the Chico State campus. So our first question for you then I we set it there, but maybe it needs a little bit of explaining to help because that’s a long, long name of what you do on campus. So what is your role on campus?

Kylee Sharp 04:18

So my formal title is the college advising and retention specialists. And what you write is kind of a mouthful, and I conceptualize that as sort of two different roles. So I specifically work for the student population within the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. So we are home to seven different departments meaning the arts, humanities, languages, history, and so on. And so within that college, I am working to sort of analyze and elevate the advising experience that students get with their faculty advisors, but also to look kind of structurally at what barriers might exist for Students do some data analysis and see what that data is pointing to in terms of trends of where students are struggling and where we can serve them better.

Teresa Hernandez 05:10

So thank you for sharing that. And I have to say, so back before I worked and came to Chico State and in my position, I also worked as a college advisor, but I was specifically a graduation advisor for the College of San Francisco state’s humanities. So I definitely correlate to your position to a degree and although our aspects of it are different, which is, but it’s amazing work, so super excited that you’re here with us, and getting to know a little bit more about you. And so in knowing kind of what your role is, what functions do does your program serve? Or how what are the resources you offers for Chico State students.

Kylee Sharp 05:47

So we have recently, in the last few months, sort of virtually launched what we’re calling the HFA success studio, across campus, we’ve been hearing about these success centers popping up, and some of them are advising centers, and some of them are tutoring centers. And so to sort of bring that idea home to the humanities and Fine Arts, we are not a success center, we are a success studio. And within this studio, we’re going to be offering some advising for students who are facing challenges. Currently, I’m the only staff advisor in that space, but we’re hoping to bring on some interns and further down the road, some additional staff advisors. And then we are also hoping to start offering some tutoring services for some very specific areas within the each of the programs where students seem to be struggling a bit more with progressing through curriculum and kind of hitting some roadblocks there.

Teresa Hernandez 06:40

Okay, that’s awesome. And if students are wanting to utilize your services, what what type of students you are cater to or their specific population.

Kylee Sharp 06:49

There are a few populations that we’ve been working with. And again, a lot of the work I do is sort of informed by data. And so one of the trends that we saw in the College of HFA is that there’s kind of a struggle to retain our first year students, so to get those students really engaged with a college and to get them to feel a sense of community early on in their academic career. And so I do outreach to freshmen students, or first year students every fall semester, so I kind of have a mandatory advising appointment with them, where we talk not only about course planning, but about long term goals, where are they seeing themselves career wise? And how do we get them connected with some resources to really help them engage. And I do utilize our student ambassador team to help those students connect with either clubs, organizations, events, or anything else on campus that can really just help them feel at home here. And that’s sort of our main, my underclassmen focus, and then for upper classmen, and the success studio really hones in on a few different populations. And those are the populations where we see what we call equity gaps. So for for first generation students, for underrepresented minority students, and for students who are Pell eligible, and they are not progressing to degree as quickly as their peers who don’t belong to those groups. And so we’re really focusing in on interacting with those students and helping bridge the gap of any needs that they might have. Making sure that they have a very clearly identified plan so that they can succeed and that they don’t have any unnecessary barriers in their way.

joshuah whittinghill 08:25

Oh, that sounds like quite a bit, especially, and to, I guess, lose the listener in that you took this role on and were hired. And you mentioned you only had about two weeks of giving to try and meet people or even get anything kind of organized. And then you were sent home. Right? So you’ve been doing all of most all of this. So like that’s about, that’s when you can actually say maybe about 99.9% of your work has has been done virtually.

Kylee Sharp 08:56

Yes, that’s, that’s definitely been the case for me. And so I think when I came into this role, I had some ideas of how quickly I wanted to move through these processes. And I’ve had to really adjust my expectations, and slowing down a bit with programmatic rollout to make sure that we’re really doing things right by student and taking our time to establish some nice strong programs.

joshuah whittinghill 09:17

Excellent. And so you mentioned some of the groups you’re working with and and i’m guessing that your studio is available to not just HFA majors but anyone taking a class within the college HFA Is that correct?

Kylee Sharp 09:31

Yes. So anybody that has questions about HFA programs or is in search of resources that relate to each HFA whether that be major students, and minor students who can get students exploring students, all are welcome to utilize the success studio services. And we’re not gonna we’re not in the business of turning any student away. And if anything, we’ll just help connect them with other appropriate resources as needed.

joshuah whittinghill 09:56

Great, great that that sounds like like one of the major roles of an advisor is knowing the resources and referring and hopefully helping students. It’s not in our office somewhere else.

Kylee Sharp 10:08

Yeah.

joshuah whittinghill 10:08

So you touched on, you touched. And obviously at this time, we know a lot of things are virtual and you did touch on you rolled out this, the new virtual studio for people. But aside from that, or even inside of that, how can people then access your services?

Kylee Sharp 10:27

Let’s say the best way to get in touch with me and utilize services is to send me an email, I do have appointments usually posted online and available through the Chico State 360 program where students have access to make online appointments. And that program is still in kind of development phases in terms of the appointment scheduling, so students can use that that’s wonderful, if not, a quick email to me is usually the quickest way to get in touch. And I’m more than happy to schedule same day or next day appointments with students.

joshuah whittinghill 10:59

Okay, and can you share your email? So we have that in the show? And we’ll put in the show notes as well?

Kylee Sharp 11:05

Yes, absolutely. So my email address is Kyliedsharp@CSU chico.edu. And actually, I just messed up their small pause on that. Oh, sorry, one moment.

joshuah whittinghill 11:24

Okay, sharp.

Kylee Sharp 11:26

Now, I’m questioning myself, I have too many email addresses.

Teresa Hernandez 11:30

Question myself all the time. And am I getting my initial in there? Is it not? Is it th? Ridiculous.

joshuah whittinghill 11:41

So I’ll react I’ll, I’ll re ask the question. And that way, it’ll give me a good place to edit when I go cut it. Okay. So for to help the listener? Can you share your email with us? So we have that in the show? And then also, we’ll put it in the show notes?

Kylee Sharp 11:55

Yes, absolutely. So the success studio has its own email address, and it is simply Successstudio@csuchico.edu And that comes directly to me and I answered as quickly as possible.

joshuah whittinghill 12:09

Okay, so just to be clear, it’s success studio app, CSU chico.edu. That’s correct. All right. Excellent. And that will be in the show notes. Okay. We really appreciate you. Being here. We’re not saying goodbye yet. We have one thing if you want to share a recommendation that you would share with the listeners, and it could be related to your advising to HFA or personal, hey, go out and watch this movie. If you have any recommendations you’d like to share.

Kylee Sharp 12:40

I love to give recommendations. I’m just making the most of the college experience. And I think Chico is a wonderful place to do that where you’re so encouraged to engage. So my recommendation to students is to not be afraid to ask big questions about their future. And don’t shy away from asking good questions to talk to anyone and everyone that you need to talk to you to get different pieces of advice on different pathways that are available to you. But at the end of the day, please recognize that there is no right answer to those questions, there is only what is right for you. So do meet with all the advisors available to you meet with faculty, with mentors with career counselors. But know at the end of the day, your decisions that you make on your own are correct for you and valid for you.

Teresa Hernandez 13:26

That’s perfect. Thank you for that. And I definitely would also encourage students to reach out send an email even if you’re not sure if that’s the right place to go. At least you have a safe place to email or a safe place to find out where it is that you your question can be better directed and believe that Kylie’s definitely going to be there to help you out and assist you in anything you have. Um, so I do have a question for you. So I know you mentioned that your position in your program is is derived a lot of student data that’s been found and kind of seeing where where the needs are. So are there some you share a little bit about that as well? And are Is there any other data or details that you’d like to share to our listeners and to us? Anything that might be related to what you do or something of interest?

Kylee Sharp 14:10

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that’s been really interesting in the College of HFA is, and I don’t necessarily think this is a surprise, but seeing that students who are declared as majors in the humanities and Fine Arts seem to be fearful and doubtful about their ability to have a successful career after graduation. And so a lot of the work that I’m doing in a lot of the partnerships that I’m building across campus is to help students see what opportunities are available to them. So in the spring semester, the college is going to be running a alumni panel and career preparation series, known as made an HFA where we’re going to bring in alumni from various different professions to talk to our students. About every three weeks we’ll have an alumni session and the weeks in between we’re going to be having a career career counseling sort of webinar on how to build resumes, how to search for internships and whatnot. So, if you are a student listening and you have any doubts about your preparedness to start your career, please tune in to the meeting each of these series in spring.

Teresa Hernandez 15:17

That’s amazing. That’s a great resource to have. And so we’ll definitely come if it comes our way we’ll share along with our students as well. And if you’re listening to this, that’s something you can tune into if you have any questions about that. anything regarding your future in HFA and so I’d hate to see you go I definitely loved this episode and everything that you have to share, especially all the amazing resources that you provide our students with. And so super excited to have you on the Chico State team. Thank you so much for being here with us, Kylee and Josh and I really appreciate it and so unfortunately it’s wraps up our episode or minisode. But definitely packed up full of information. So really appreciate your time.

Kylee Sharp 15:56

Yes, thank you so much for having me

joshuah whittinghill 15:59

Goodbye Kylee.

Kylee Sharp 16:00

Bye