 Good evening and welcome. I'm so glad you're joining us for this evening's presentation, which we call a family's guide to college. My name is Erica Calero. I use she and hers pronouns and I'm the vice provost for student affairs at the University of Vermont. I've been at UVM for about 15 years in a variety of capacities and I'm joined this evening by Joe Russell, Assistant Dean of Students, who will introduce himself further in just a few minutes. We also have with us Carly Schneider, who's behind the scenes this evening, helping to answer questions. Slide please. Um, I want to start off by saying I've been really looking forward to this evening and the opportunity to greet you and welcome you as you prepare for your students fall semester at the University of Vermont. One of the best parts of what we get to do at UVM is facilitate the growth and development of of the incredible students who come here and over time we've observed that much of what helps students transition and adjust and thrive is set into motion very intentionally by their parents and guardians. That happens both before they arrive and after they arrive on campus. The corollary to this is that students who don't have the benefit of pre arrival conversations, which constitute cognitive rehearsal and expectation setting. These students have to invent the will for themselves on the fly after arriving here, and that's without a doubt harder. So we've distilled some of the most important lessons we've learned into what we'll share this evening. I would encourage you to take notes, take screenshots, rewatch the presentation at a later date, and most importantly, you can continue or potentially begin to have important pre college conversations with your student. Your students have been really successful to date and we're thrilled with what we're learning about them already. And they will need to draw on and build new skills for success in college. This evening we have a Q&A chat feature which will turn on part way through the presentation and will do our very very best to answer as many questions as possible. The sessions being recorded. We will caption it and post it soon for you to share and rewatch. Next slide, please. A moment to reflect. Well, our newest count amounts had their high school years deeply impacted by the pandemic. They experienced incredible upheaval, a rapid deceleration in life as they knew it, followed by remote learning, hybrid learning, masking, physical distancing, which for most students were very difficult to the point of being quite painful. And more recently we've had a gradual transition to loosened COVID restrictions. I think it's important to take stock and really reflect on where your student has been and how they're doing and to talk about that with them. We've all been impacted and students certainly have been deeply impacted and we've all grown in some ways and taking stock of that growth, the resourcefulness and resilience. That's also important to do with them. Community care is something that we center and really value at the University of Vermont and by staying attentive to what community care means at any given point in time, we will get to have a great move in orientation and a wonderful year. It's important for you to remind your student that a campus experience without COVID restrictions lies ahead of them, but know that there is still the need to be thoughtful and sometimes cautious. Our policies with respect to COVID have been and continue to be data informed and in step with guidance issued by the state of Vermont, but if COVID's taught us one thing, it's that we need to be ready to change and adapt. Next slide, please. All right. The first year of college is a huge growth moment. Every student experiences that transition from high school to college differently and we know that there are some predictable phases in the adjustment process, times of elation, connection, the exhilaration of independence and there are also bumps and hurdles. Learning to manage the limited resource that is time, making choices and decisions that support their health and their goals, making new friends, developing a sense of belonging in a new place. These are all full of ups and downs. We know to expect this. Students know to expect this and yet to live it, to navigate it, will both require and it will develop in them new levels of resilience, tenacity, help-seeking, boundary setting, flexibility and a whole lot more. The good news is it is supposed to be challenging. Students are surrounded by peers going through the same or similar things and at the University of Vermont, we have a tremendous set of supports and services and staff and faculty whose life work this is. Slide, please. Every student's life experiences and skill set coming into college varies. With time and with experience, their skill sets develop. We know that students who create overlap between their academic lives and their social lives are the happiest and the most successful. There's a veritable mountain of data that supports this. As their skills in these areas evolve, so does their sense of maturity. And you've observed this over the past 17 or 18 years and will be observing it over the next four years. Being comfortable with discomfort is something that they'll grow into further and it matters a great deal. Growth mindset, looking at failure as a learning opportunity matters. As young adults are sort of jostled out of their comfort zone through the choice to attend college, they encounter challenge, they encounter difficulty. You may hear about this through their tears, through complaints, potentially through low grades and that's all part of a rapid phase of growth and development. In a sense, you count on us to engineer discomfort. That discomfort is an essential ingredient in the first year and end of success in college. Next slide please. So, having said this, the role of the student, the role of your student, is to build skill sets that enable them to climb out of the discomfort and challenge or work through it, perhaps better said. As a student, there are critical behaviors that can help them do this and you see them on the slide here. Even very successful students in high school, again as your students have been, they will have to retool and adjust to new expectations and to a new level of rigor and and busyness. Next slide please. Okay, I mentioned supports and services. At UVM there are broad and there are specialized supports that you can think of as existing in a set of concentric circles with your student in the middle. The outermost ring is our campus community and in the space between the unique opportunities and supports that students will access at different times. Again, and I really want to emphasize this, even very successful high school students are supposed to need some of these supports and if your student can't fathom that they might need help, you have the opportunity to help them adjust that expectation because truly every student will use some combination of these and other offerings at different points along the way. Next slide. Okay, the social landscape is exciting and largely unknown at this point, although every student has some ideas, some hopes. To have a really great social experience and social life, communication, self-regulation, boundaries, these are key pieces that students have begun to acquire and will continue to develop. Now we don't expect that students are coming to UVM in a final state with respect to these. We do expect that they'll take responsibility for their choices and we have great systems in place to support them, whether their choices are ultimately good or unhelpful and this can be an incredibly helpful or important learning zone for them. Students will metaphorically scrape their knees and every single student will be different by the time they come home for winter break. So imagine how different they'll be in four years. Next slide please. Okay, my last slide before my colleague Joe Russell takes over. That sense of maturity that I mentioned earlier, here are some of the ways that students can stretch, build connections, join community, explore new communities of interest and affinity and identity. This can be exhilarating, this can sometimes be hard. Wondering whether they fit in, sometimes feeling that they don't, but persevering nonetheless and finding ways to persevere is part of the magic and it's part of the skillset development of the first year. Joe, over to you. Hi everyone. I hope you can all hear me now. Thanks Erica. What a joy it is to spend some time with you all, even in this platform online, not in person. To quickly introduce myself, my name is Joe Russell. As Erica mentioned, I use he him pronouns. I'm the assistant dean of students here at UVM and I have started working at UVM back in 2005 and so have been here for a few years. The primary thing that I do on campus is coordinate or lead the university's care team and so that's a group of staff here on campus who help support students who may be kind of going through a difficult moment or struggling in one way or another. And so again, some of the thoughts that we are sharing with you tonight kind of have been developed over years as we've worked with students and families to help promote or drive their success. Patty, we can go to the next slide. We're going to spend a few moments here going through a few tips that we think may be super helpful in framing the success of your student. Thanks to Erica for starting off with some of the big ones. Really thinking about some of those big buckets of what will a student need to be successful here at UVM. And now I'm going to kind of drill down a little bit into some details. So the first one, next slide Patty, the first one sometimes and especially when we've done this presentation in person we get to this slide and there are people in the audience kind of eyes go a little bit wide and they're a little bit taken aback. But we think it's a super important part of the conversation. And so the first tip is to really ask the very intentional question is my student ready for independent living in college at UVM right now? And again, I can imagine that many of you are like no Joe that train has left the station that's not a question that we can be asking right now and yet we invite you just to pause and think about it because it is not too late fortunately. Now is a good moment to just be asking that question and calibrating and having some dialogue hopefully as a family about this. Some of the ways that we may encourage you to think about readiness are on the slide. Again Erica touched on some of those the skill steps that may be needed for them to step into the college environment. Some of those are repeated here. But again the things that we kind of note and I may highlight a few of them. Is there a readiness? Is there an eagerness of yeah this is actually is the thing that I'm really excited about. I'm looking forward to the independence of college. I'm looking forward to the challenge and again we're going to reiterate there needs to be a sense of that challenge will sometimes be difficult. There will be moments of kind of oh man that didn't go quite as well as I hoped it will and an eagerness and an invitation for that kind of challenge. Some of the things that we see that could be a little bit concerning. Again our students who they get to college and that first semester is really difficult and so if I end up connecting with a family and talking about it we kind of hear some of these things. Well they've been super isolated and withdrawn. They've really kind of had a hard time leaving the nest so to speak. They've had a hard time kind of really thriving outside of the very direct family support system that we've created. Certainly when there is a great difficulty in coping with challenge, conflict, roommate issues will come up. Often we will ask for a brief show of hands of how many of your how many students represented in the room have ever had to share a room before and sometimes we find the majority of students may never have had to share a room before. So now all of a sudden they're sharing with one or two roommates and conflict is going to arise. So what's the ability to be able to advocate for themselves, communicate directly with compassion, seek resources and support if needed, and cope with some of those compromised moments that are inevitable. Again Erica touched on this and I'm going to highlight it again and just say and really really one of the huge ones is no one expects. In fact I think this is this is quite the opposite or hope is that your student is really engaging with a broad network of relationship and support here at UVM. And so again a part of the readiness for college comes in are they able and willing to be able to make those contacts to be able to reach out for support and help to be able to make relationship with the people who will help their college environment and college experience be super successful. So some things to think about that we're going to again maybe drill down one level deeper. If you've ever read WebMD has some interesting articles kind of in a partnership with the Jet Foundation that talk about readiness for college so if that's of interest to you feel free to look some of those things up. Next slide Patty and again even though we are in mid-July and heading towards moving in late August that seems right around the corner the invitation really is to if there is a sense of well okay maybe maybe they're not quite ready and or I will name if there is real clarity around actually yeah no we need to really think about the is this an okay to wait moment and here are some of the hallmarks or things that we again we have seen again I will say to families often when I am meeting with a student or talking with a family at the end of November and they really have been having a hard time and we will start to hear the stories of well they had a pretty significant suicide attempt and were hospitalized for a while in spring semester of their senior year and the supports as they came to UVM kind of really were not in place it feels like we have set a student up for a really difficult experience and so I will ask you all to review some of the things that are on the slide and if these things are true again a moment of real tap into the networks that you trust and that you know and those could be primary healthcare therapy family members trusted loved ones and kind of just start to have a conversation of saying okay do we have what we need and is our student ready for the independence of their first year of college I would also say we are willing partners in this conversation and so if these things are true and there is this kind of small seed in your mind of saying okay actually well they talked about you know our student really has had a history and a hard time over time developing and establishing really strong networks and what will that look like if they come to UVM and have a similar challenge please know that we are happy to kind of partner with you in some of that conversation next slide while I just again highlight a couple of these that are we think are pretty important one of the things that we consistently hear and again I will just invite us to think about is this sense that well here are the challenge that they were facing in high school but UVM will be a clean slate a fresh start and everything will be good and it is our hope as well I think there is this unbridled optimism and excitement about the start of college that we all really value and it's kind of maybe why we all work in higher end and I say to parents often mayor hope that things will go well it may not be sufficient hope is not a strategy and so I think if some of these things are true for your student or have been true or there is a moment of actually saying well I don't we're not quite sure if they're ready my invitation is it is a moment and it is not too late to start to think about what are the strategies and what are the resources that we can put in place to help their success at UVM and or that could even be as far as saying and maybe what we need to do is do some of the pre-work that's needed before we send them to UVM and so different for a semester or different for a year maybe actually the outcome that's best for everyone next slide please importantly again I think we are I'm cautious to say this is not a closed gate of saying if any of these things are true they can't come to college that's really not what it is I think in our experience certainly in my experience in the work that I do on the care team most important is if there are some of these things that are true for your student the question I would ask is well what's the plan for support how are they going to be supported to cope with and to be successful in spite of despite of and sometimes because of some of the challenges that they face and so if if you have great answers to that question then I applaud you great job keep up that work and if they answer to the question well what's the plan for support is well we'll see we'll see we just want them to do it on their own to start and we'll see how things go I might invite you to say that that really is kind of setting up a student for real real struggle and difficulty and failure so support could look like accommodations through our student accessibility services office if a student has had a 504 plan or an IEP or someone that support in high school we really do encourage you to connect with this office preemptively and to have those things in place and then a student has the agency and the ability to kind of implement and utilize those accommodations as needed as opposed to trying to scramble halfway through a semester to get those supports in place when they find that they may benefit from them or need them mental health and physical health providers for emotional mental health challenges or physical health concerns again helpful to do as much proactive preemptive planning and strategizing as possible and so again if that kind of support is is helpful or have been utilized up until this point my encouragement would be to have that connection and have that in place prior to arriving in august contact or counseling center contact or student health center and start to have a conversation of what does that support look like in this first semester of college Erica started to talk about academic supports and again your student will have started to already and will continue to get connected with many of their primary academic resources and so again you as parents and families feel free to be asking your student of so who are you connecting to around some of the academic things that you may need again some of those supports could be not just faculty or advisors but could be the writing center our tutoring center other resources that are part of what we expect students to utilize in order to be successful and again we'll touch on that a little bit later on and of course the final one is just the ongoing conversation as a family about what will the level of and what will it look like to have support from home as they start college what's quantity and quality of that support looking like and if you've not started to really ask the question of your students what are you expecting that to look like here's what we think it might look like is that what you think it might look like my encouragement is to start to have those conversations we're going to put in the chat as well a few links just to kind of various places on our website that have some of these resources and again we encourage you if you haven't already to explore them and follow up on them next slide please again in the same vein the third tip that we have really is essential it is a sense of a partnership that exists between UVM and you all in support of your student safety and success here at UVM and so there are a number of things on this slide and we're not going to go into details but I'm going to encourage and ask some us a little bit of a a reflection moment of do you in your family and have you all had open honest frank conversations about some of these topics specifically very research and data tell us that certainly at this age this starts to shift a little bit as students kind of develop their own sense of adulthood and emerge into independence but expectations set by parents guardians and families are really really powerful and strong and so what are what what is the expectation about substance use in college is that something that you've talked about is that something that you've had open dialogue about have you talked about healthy relationships consent and sex again when we do this presentation in person quite often at this point in the conversation there's a slight hush and again some wide eyes parents and you can see there are some some parents who are not in their head and it's clear yeah no we talk about sex all the time in our family and set some expectations about what that might look like for our student as they start college and for some families it's not something that's really broached or discussed openly prior to this presentation Eric and I were both talking about a wonderful resource that we both recently read a book called sexual citizens Jennifer Hirsch and blanking on the second name that shame us shame us thanks Erica a really really insightful book that kind of really delves into this concept of what does healthy sexual relationship look like in the college years and what's at the the root of some of the challenge that we see around sexual violence on a college campus and so again if that is an area of interest to you I might invite you to get your hands on that book read it and use that as a really helpful tool to be talking with your student part of the point here in this tip is we are not going to be able to do this all on our own some of these topics will come up they will come up intentionally because we have created opportunities for students to kind of hear about and learn about these things and they will come up in the kind of the ethos and in the air over their four years at UVM and our hope is and expectation is that there is partnership with the family unit and have in these conversations so again here it is not too late in the weeks that you have your students still with you living under your roof if that's the case use that as an opportunity to have some open and honest conversations set some expectations ask them what they think ask them what they plan to do and maybe even as well discuss the and how will you communicate with us once you are actually in college are you actually going to be talking about what's going on with us at home and how do we support you through that we think it's really helpful conversation next slide we also feel like it's important for families to know a few we're again not going to go into detail here but just to highlight a few of the things that we think are really helpful that help keep our student population safe so in these couple of slides here in the green boxes are some resources that we want to highlight in the blue boxes are things that we think your student should know so we kind of give it to you families as helpful these are helpful things that you can ask very specifically about you know are you aware that UVM's official means of communication with you is your email and so are you checking email and once you once your student establishes their UVM email to be asking the question how are you keeping up and managing and not just ignoring and being overwhelmed with like oh there's so many emails I don't know what to do not a helpful strategy being able to help your student think through yeah no I'm going to be on top of my emails super helpful one of the important resources that I'm going to highlight in the green box in bold under strong infrastructure is a really amazing and robust safety app we it's called live safe this is on your students checklist we're going to get back to this and highlight it again but I'm just going to name out loud this is one of those things that again is in a very tangible way for most of our students who are pretty tech native a really robust platform it not just gets them connected to resources and supports if they need things but it allows them to make reports it allows them to connect with other resources on campus it really is a pretty wonderful thing and again so again as you start to set some how your how is your to-do list going to check in quickly about the live safe app again pretty high level there are lots of resources here at UDM to help keep your students safe so from large emergency response mechanisms if something were to happen to the care team which again kind of helps support students who may be going through a difficult moment and again just kind of regular and ongoing communication with students to help them know when and how to keep safe next slide please again I invite you all to read on the left one of the things that I am I am going to say out loud and ask you to say to your students and I will acknowledge this is a tricky one because on one hand we hear from students the reason that they don't lock their residence hall door is because they have built really wonderful relationships and community on their floor or with their friends so that's a win that's like exactly what we are hoping for and yet we know when students don't lock their doors sometimes laptops or other valuables go walk in and no one wants that so again we will invite you to set some expectations for your student of saying yeah we get it we get that you all want to just kind of come and go from each other's rooms as though you are siblings at home coming and going from each other's bedrooms and there's a lot of valuable stuff there that you think that we would like you to keep safe so it's a shameless plug that I'm asking you to help your student come into college with a sense of no I'm going to keep my door closed and locked and that's a really helpful conversation for them to have as a roommate group about what that means and and what that looks like with each other next slide please again we're going to talk a little bit about some of these resources in a little while so I'll try and not be a duplicative in bold again to highlight a really helpful important thing and we we ensure that students are aware of this kind of as they arrive on campus is a sense of UVM prioritizes safety and well-being over everything else and so quite often the concern is well I'm worried about a friend but we may have been drinking that night so I'm not going to call for help because we'll get in trouble or something has happened and I don't want to make a report because again we may have been out partying and I don't I don't want to get in trouble UVM has a fairly robust medical amnesty program that holds consequences and the get it in trouble put to the side and prioritizes no please call for help get someone that either yourself or for someone else if they need help please call if there's something that happened and you need to make a report the the get it in trouble part is not the focus the focus is health and safety and well-being of our community and that's what we want students to kind of really hold centrally for us again we're going to maybe move on here we're going to come back to some of these things but again we just wanted to kind of list them out here in an essential way as we go through the presentation so I'll move on to the next slide right the next step in addition to kind of knowing some of those resources and programs or safety things research tells us that students who are more connected with resources and more engaged tend to be more successful and so again it may be a question of helping your student identify the right balance so we certainly don't want students to over be so overly involved that it gets in the way of their success or their health they're not able to sleep or eat because they are so busy similarly the other end of that pendulum swing is equally not good students who are not engaged in any in any way at all and so often students have a fairly structured and robust way of being involved through the high school years and again my encouragement to you all as a family is to have some conversation about what might that look like as the transition to UVM happens what are some of the academic things how are they starting to already think about getting out of their UVM experience what they will need to be successful in a career after UVM how do they connect with local resources when things happen and these are proactive connections just to build relationship or certainly being aware of probably for most of our students the most local and most knowledgeable connection and resource will be their residential life hall staff people who live and work in the building that they live in and so helpful getting to know them again the the most local version of that will be their undergrad RA who lives on the floor as well I will say or our RAs are wonderful and RAs are also full-time students themselves and so in addition to the RA resource getting to know the full-time staff in their building is a really helpful thing as you do move in these staff will be fairly visible and around and again a wonderful opportunity for your student and for yourselves to introduce yourselves and say hi just a note for for you if you've not already discovered this or your student hasn't already discovered this there are again some really helpful ways of students forming community and giving support and finding resource our interfaith center on campus our mosaic center for students of color our prism center for LGBTQ plus students and or women and gender equity center on campus are really helpful and little hubs of resources and support for students around specific identity issues again we've talked a little bit about some of our health and wellbeing resources I'm hopeful that you all are aware of them both our primary care through our student health clinic and counseling psychiatry services on campus a lot of education outreach that happens around everything from again healthy sexuality and relationships to substance use in our living well office and one little plug for UVM has fairly recently partnered with an organization called HopeWorks to provide advocacy services if students do experience any kind of relationship or sexual violence and so these are available 24 seven to our students and they're wonderful wonderful resources and again so just to highlight one more level of support and resource available to your student one more app for your student to download is listed at the bottom of that screen if they haven't already gotten the navigate app I encourage them to do so and they can do so at go.uvm.edu slash get guide next slide here we go again outside of resources that may be helpful in their success it really is an encouragement to be active and engaged and we research tells us that our UVM student body is a really engaged student body clubs organizations if your student is interested in something and it doesn't already exist that UVM chances are they will have opportunity and support to be able to create that opportunity here for themselves and others who are interested so encourage your student to do that encourage your student to seek leadership opportunities or get involved that's something that they want or have done previously our student government association is very vibrant and awesome the inter residence association is a leadership body among or residential population that again really helps drive both advocacy when students want to kind of raise their raise issues with res life but also just what do they want to see how do they want their experience to be that that group is is pretty vibrant, active and amazing so again here is an opportunity to have some conversation and maybe even just to ask gently have you started to think about what are the clubs or activities or sports or things that you may engage with as you start UVM when your student arrives here on campus there will be many opportunities activity fair type things or very very engaging and in person opportunities for students to start to identify for themselves yeah I think I'm going to go out for that club or do that sport or do this thing with people on my floor and as they do build those community bonds and get engaged we find that their overall academic success tends to go up as well all right I'm going to try and keep us the time here and so next slide Patty and I'm going to maybe pass back over to Erica here to finish out our presentation thanks everybody thank you Joe great so as we consider communication well let me take a step I can say as I hope you're really hearing clearly this evening our philosophy is both one of talking and working with students and we're happy to hear from you and partner with you to support your students success an important area of their learning is in the realm of communication finding information using information asking for information asking for help becoming the handler of their daily needs and their life business many of your students have tremendous skill and significant experience with this and some students have have more ground to cover all students again coming to college that they'll they'll gain a lot of skill and facility in this area and it's important so you can support this particular area which I hope you'll hear is an affirmation you know of practice that you've already been engaging in as a parent you can support this area by really encouraging independence and resourcefulness next slide please right so part of handling their own life business has to do with what information can and cannot be shared you know it's it's broadly our experience that if you were to look at a dozen institutions they would have a dozen different not not not you know wildly different but they would have different approaches to sharing students educational and by extension some personal information the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 and amended several times since then it it primarily you know we're talking about it tonight because it protects student information but also and I think this is really important upon arrival in college it empowers your student to make a big move in the direction of personal agency in their own life now the good news we all want the same thing the growth and success of students our direct work with students means that we don't have a university-wide FERPA waiver we do hold ourselves to a standard of partnership with students and families with the student as the driver of their experience in rare instances such as when we have a clear health or safety concern we will contact parents and guardians directly next slide please great and really very related to this and because we value openness and communication on a wide range of topics these are some of the moments you will hear from us so regular emails broad communications right on down to very student-specific communications next slide please Peggy okay Joe really did cover quite a bit of this and so I'm not going to go into much more detail I think it's been well covered here's what I'll say for families and for students awareness of the fine print is important it's useful and to that end these are some of the things that we think may be useful to you your students will be given some of this information during orientation we have a number of policies and an extensive catalog and handbook and so forth we will not shovel all of that in the direction of entering students but what we will do in the context of orientation and early communications to students is ensure that we are talking about some of the most important policies talking about safety for those who would want to have these links for later this is a good moment to take a screenshot and then I'll ask for the next slide please okay and this is just a recap this is what we have talked through this evening and I think I think as families as folks who really love our newest catamounts you do have a number of conversations that maybe you know maybe a continuation of of conversations you have been having and you may have gotten some new I hope helpful ideas for for further conversations and as Joe said for those who haven't really engaged in much of this intentionally in conversation with your students yet you do indeed have time and it is indeed really important to cover to cover a lot of this ground with your students as Joe said hope is not a plan there's no better way to encapsulate it and so your student and really your families ability to talk through a lot of these very important topics even if it's new ground for you even if it's if there's a little bit of finding your pace and finding your flow in conversation around expectations or around topics that that potentially are uncommon or uncomfortable I know you can do it and I know that your students will benefit enormously for the effort that you'll make to have these conversations next slide please okay so it's mid-July but we are definitely planning for fall and we could debate the best season in Vermont all day but instead of doing that I will settle the topic by saying that early fall is best and so we hope you will visit this is another good good slide to get a screenshot of so you have the dates and having done that Patty could we get the next slide please yeah we don't want to wrap up our presentation before mentioning a few important things now Joe spoke to this and I will simply underscore that every student should download the live safe app on their phone the icon that you see here is the one to look for and our second point here ever find learning modules will be live in early August the second bullet point under ever find learning modules gives you a sense of the content the topics that that these modules cover they are mini courses mini mini mini courses half an hour 45 minutes occasionally a little longer than that students will receive emails with links to these mini courses and you can encourage them to be on the lookout for those emails the best advice is when you receive a prompt to complete a module to go ahead and do it straight away completing these modules means that all students at UVM have a common baseline of understanding on some really important topics and what the modules cover really does represent a big portion of what it means to be a member of our community next slide please yes okay I think this is our last slide before we get to Q&A upcoming events another good one for screenshot you're also getting communications via email about these but these are the upcoming teams live sessions that you'll be able to access next and and there will be more coming after that apologies for the low flying airplane helicopter Patty next slide please right so at this point we would like to invite questions and we'll do our best in the next 13 minutes to answer a multitude and Joe my friend please be ready to unmute and chime in so let's see I'm just going to navigate over to the place in my team's area where I can see questions so take go ahead and take a moment parents guardians if there are students watching go ahead and take a moment to put your question in the Q&A and we'll answer we'll answer a few questions now I will also chime in from stage left even though I'm not on camera and it's our Q&A moderator Carly has noticed a theme about some kind of very specific to res life questions about kind of residence halls set up or amenities or features and so again I may just invite folks and highlight the residential experience sessions coming up on July 27th as a good place to kind of be able to get some of that detailed answers we will try and do our best to not speak on behalf of res life but invite folks to really engage and show up for the presentation with with staff from that area to get answers to those questions great okay I'm seeing a few questions coming through is there a place to sign up I'm just gonna and I'm gonna read them out loud so that everyone can hear and so that the captioning captures them is there a place to sign up for general parent email updates such as info about academic calendar add drop times dorm closures fall visit weekend etc we haven't received many parent emails Joe do you know how this is working this year I will say Joe as you're thinking yes there is going to be an opportunity and it will come to you proactively for you to affirm that you would like to receive regular updates it is also the case that you will receive some communications without asking to be included in that communication process it is typically part of the as we get closer to the start of the semester that process will be will be made clearer to you agree I will agree and just affirm the you all will be able to as kind of part of your associated with your students record here at UVM have email addresses for yourselves included and if you are so if you are not receiving lots of emails it may be helpful to reach out and you could reach out through the admissions department or reach out to our office just to confirm that accurate you email information is on file I'll stop there okay thank you we have a comment I value the focus here on independence for our students and I really appreciate that comment that is certainly you know one of the you know in the biggest possible sense it is one of the grand purposes of this endeavor and independence does not mean isolation and so what I hope you have also heard this evening is that we are we are very intentional and we have an abundance of experience in helping students and nudging them in the direction of independence that is also supported and there are guardrails and safety nets in place as well we have Carly thank you for this and just I'll say this out loud for the good of all a copy of this presentation and all other family presentation can be found on the summer roadmap web page and there's a link to that here's one we have found out that my son has been assigned to a traditional dorm rather than a learning community something he was deeply hoping to be a part of we are of course grateful he has on campus housing but wondered if you could recommend some ways for him to connect with or create a community to help supply the overlap you mentioned between academic and social spheres self-advocacy is an area in which he is just beginning to develop Joe I think that's a great question for you to field sure I will do my best it's a good question and and and the question about how do you build community and find your people I think is a question valid for everyone I think it's something that all of our students kind of come in to college grappling with the helpful thing here is for all students regardless of learning community placement or traditional fall there will be helpful programmatic elements and things going on in their living space that are really helpful ways to engage again as we mentioned you don't have to be part of a learning community to be engaged across the clubs organizations intramural sports activities here at UBM and so my encouragement might be to be asking the question of well okay there will be things happening in your residence hall your RA will be doing programming there will be events that happen you're hopefully going to start to find some of your people in that environment and someone that will come to who are you being able to go grab a meal with who are you going to go see the game with who are you going to go play intramural broom ball with and be safe doing so but some of it will happen outside of the residence hall and again that will be what are the clubs and organizations what are the ways of engaging outside of the residence hall that also may help kind of help facilitate and increase the chances of being able to find your people so it is it's a good question each student is going to kind of answer it in their own way I would name speaking specifically to the person who asked that question my hope is that you've been able to in gentle and encouraging and supportive ways ask your student that oh how do you feel about that are you thinking are you excited about that you seem a little bit worried maybe a little bit disappointed that you didn't get into a learning community placement of your choice how are you going to utilize that and make the most of it while you start your experience at UVM I hope that's at least a little helpful it is thank you very much um I'm going to scoot back over to the questions there was one that I want to make sure they're coming in a different order for me now and I don't want to lose track of where we were there was a question about consent and I want to ensure that we address that so sorry apologies while I scroll here it is is there a process of obtaining consent from a sexual partner that the school expects to be used okay I mentioned the ever five modules the learning modules that all students will be receiving links to complete and one of the modules as you saw it does indeed cover sexual violence prevention and as part of that module it is our hope and indeed our expectation that our student body has a common baseline of understanding about what is and is not okay at the University of Vermont that learning module is not a proxy for a lifetime of learning about healthy sexuality healthy relationships etc I would urge and indeed request that families strongly consider having conversations with their students about healthy relationships and there are numerous resources that are available to families you probably have had access to some of these previously during the course of your of your students you know upbringing and education in school if you have not had access to that Joe do we on our student health services website do we have resources for families I know we have resources for students and we have workshops in abundance about sex sexuality healthy relationships I think again I've made resources in many places in a helpful way some of those are on our website on the senior students website some of those are on the affirmative action equal opportunity office website as well I will just chime in if I'm understanding the nature of the question I have heard of some universities really implementing very specific and formal processes or I'll even I think I've at one point heard about like apps being used specifically around consent so UVM does not have that UVM's model of consent is an affirmative consent model it goes beyond just the absence of a no and and we expect our students to be seeking affirmative consent from each other and though this is not a university model I will borrow and cite our some of our sexuality health educators on campus when I hear them kind of do this work with students one of the ways that they teach students about this is they use the acronym fries to talk about consent freely given reversible informed enthusiastic and specific to behavior specific to each kind of behavior so again our hope is students are learning some of these things as they come in our encouragement would be for you as a family to also talk about what does that look like as your student joins us here so it's a helpful very specific question and I will with apologies to our sexuality health educators on campus I hope that we answered it okay that's great thank you the next question is are we able to visit our students at other times besides parents weekend and short answer here yes yes yes and for families who cannot or do not plan to visit that's okay that we love when families visit and we understand that it's not in the realm of possibility for every family and to that I would say fill the mail with junk food if you can write letters texts and calls and these things are important but there really is something special about a tactile something that arrives in the mail particularly early on and it does not have to be you're not going for wow factor you're going for love factor it can really really buoy you know a transitioning first year student to receive anything at all from a loved one in the mail so please please do that do you have a strike policy if they break a rule is the next question and I'm going to surmise here that we mean like a one two or three strikes policy no we don't have two three or any number of strikes policy specifically we do have and we do communicate regularly with students as well as publish on the web the policies that are applicable to students academic integrity behavioral standards you know property and so forth and so students who do not violate those policies do not need to worry and and luckily it is the case that those policies closely mirror the standards that they're already accustomed to following broadly we we tend not to have niche or unusual expectations in our community um so if there's a particular policy that you're curious about I would encourage you to have a look on the UVM website and see you will you will almost certainly find information related to the action or the behavior that you're curious about and you will find policy guidance there our center for student conduct is another good place to find out about what happens if it's the case that a student does bump up against a policy there's very good and thorough information there and the professionals who work in that office are experienced they are very much driven by a desire to engage with and help students learn we do not take a punitive approach although it can feel sometimes to students like the result of a decision that they have made is punitive that is not the intent or purpose that our conduct process supports the next question oh I see a comment from Carly our moderator housing assignments will be sent out from residential life on or around August 1st I take this to mean that there have been a few questions about housing which is no surprise and it's a perfect opportunity to remind everyone who is still with us at this point that there will be some res life sessions upcoming in the next several weeks and I think we have two or three of those sessions planned and they will be full of information details you'll have the opportunity to ask all kinds of questions and hear from a range of experts who who handle different parts and pieces of the residential experience so it's a great note to end on I'll just again end by thanking you for joining us this evening we have been really looking forward to this opportunity to talk about opportunities that you have as parents and guardians to support your student in preparing for and transitioning to the University of Vermont we are really looking forward to getting to know your students we began the fall semester last year fully masked indoors classes labs dance you know studios athletic facility we began mass and we anticipate that we will be beginning this year unmasked which means we get to see everybody's smiles at move in and as as they you know sort of transition into new communities and new relationships in college we're really looking forward to that thank you for joining us please be in touch with further needs or questions we're here we're here for you we're here for your students take care have a good evening