The Daily Gamecock, the newspaper of the University of South Carolina, gave us a shout out today, talking about how Louisiana State University and other Southeastern Conference schools are using alcohol education programs. To read the full article, go here: http://www.dailygamecock.com/news/item/4101-sec-schools-crack-down-on-drinking
The typical response rate for college alcohol and drug surveys is somewhere between 25 and 35%. But at Stetson University, more than 90% of the freshman class completes the MyStudentBody Essentials course—even though it’s not mandatory. What strategy produces those results?
The answer is: lots of strategies – and the key is to use more than one.
Working with Stetson’s Director of Health Education and Wellness, Lynn Stadelman, MyStudentBody product coordinator Tyler Achilles determined four elements that, used together, encourage the best possible response rate. “Most of these strategies are things prevention professionals are already doing. We found that what was most important was to do all of these things,” Achilles explained. “But we also found some small tweaks that could really improve a strategy’s effectiveness.” Some examples:
1) Advance notification: Sending advance notification by [snail] mail is especially useful in getting students to take Web-based surveys. It literally gives more weight to the request. Achilles notes it’s also an opportunity to send an incentive.
2) Incentives: Surprisingly, offering a guaranteed low-cost incentive—such as a free soda at the college café—to everyone who takes your survey raises response rates more effectively than offering a chance at a higher-value prize that only a few will win.
3) Reminders: The magic number for emailed reminders turns out to be three. After that, reminders don’t generate much further response, and may start to seem intrusive.
4) Sharing the results: Students want to know how their responses contribute to shaping policy; they also want to see how their answers compare to those of their peers. Knowing they’ll see group results increases student participation.
To see more of Achilles and Stadelman’s advice, view the poster they presented in January at NASPA’s Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention and Intervention Conference in Atlanta.
The anticipated upgrades to MyStudentBody recently took effect without a hitch. Woohoo!
The new automatic password reset is up and running. Now, when students (as well as parents and administrators) forget their MyStudentBody passwords, they can click on “forgot password?” and be prompted to reset their password using security questions to verify their identity.
To facilitate secure identification for this process, we’ve also updated registration, and will be changing over to using email addresses as usernames. New sample login instructions are available on MyStudentBody Admin, under “Guides and Documents”. For more details on the changes, see About MyStudentBody’s New Login Process.
Although MyStudentBody’s Nutrition, Tobacco, Stress, and Sexual Health sites are gone, the MyStudentBody website still covers these important aspects of student well-being. In fact, we have updated articles on topics including healthy eating, e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, talking about safer sex, and even the health implications of body art and tattoos. You can check them out in the Student Center, just log in to MyStudentBody with your username and password.
Have questions or want more information about how you can get access to MyStudentBody? Request a guest pass here.
Located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University is a small, nationally-renowned liberal arts college with approximately 5,000 undergraduate students.
Wake Forest’s course offerings and degree programs are designed to provide a well-rounded, diverse education for its students. Undergraduates may select among 38 major fields and 55 minors, with over half of graduating seniors seeking degree credits abroad.
In order to ensure students enjoy not only a well-rounded academic education, but a thorough health education as well, Wake Forest requires students to pass a health course that informs students about the effect of lifestyle behaviors that may lead to disease and other illnesses.
Every undergraduate student is required to enroll in and pass a course called HES 100: Lifestyle and Health. On the Wake Forest website, this course is described as “a lecture course that deals with the effect of lifestyle behaviors on various health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases.”
The purpose of the course is to “give students a guide for living a healthy lifestyle,” said health educator Natascha Romeo. “Every student must take the class to graduate.”
Since implementing a mandatory health course was challenging, Wake Forest sought a program that would blur the lines between a standard lecture course and a personalized wellness tool that students would find interesting and useful. The campus had taken great pains to ensure this balance, including bringing in health specialists to elaborate on specific lifestyle topics relevant to students.
To find out how Natascha and Wake Forest University met this challenge, read more here.
At the NASPA Annual Conference 2012 a lot of the sessions got me thinking about personal brand and professional networking. Conferences are always great for professional development and growing your skill set, meeting new people, and creating connections (personal and work-related) – all things that can help you in your career.
There are, however, some things to keep in mind as you jump into the social sphere and put yourself – including your personality, opinions, and online demeanor – on public display. It’s important to be careful about what you post and how you interact with others on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. I’ll get into some of my tips for both students and administrators and what I learned at one particular session below.
Before I get into that, let me tell you about two things that got me really excited about the conference in general. What I found most interesting (and different from previous NASPA conferences that I’ve attended) was the amount of networking and professional development done through sharing on social platforms during the conference. At prior annual conferences, connections were mainly made face-to-face or through email after the conference with maybe a little social networking thrown in.
In 2012, there was an explosion of social networking, especially through Twitter on which attendees or people around the country could follow the #naspa12 hashtag and “listen in” on sessions they couldn’t attend and contribute thoughtfully to the ideas being presented. This sort of thing blows my mind and makes me appreciate the recent advances in technology and the ubiquity of social platforms.
Additionally, I was delightfully surprised at the amount of sessions dedicated to talking about social networks and how that can affect administrators and students. I say delightfully surprised because as the social media coordinator of MyStudentBody and a strong believer in social and professional networking, I believe we should be talking about this and it makes me happy that others do, too.
One session in particular caught my attention because of its interactive setup. It was called “Influencing Student Behavior Through the Idea of Personal Brand” and it talked particularly about a program designed to get high-risk groups on campus, mainly athletes and Greeks, to think about their actions and how it effects them both personally and as a group. The session went through a series of slides depicting brands and talking about how they got to where they are and about setbacks incurred by seemingly small things. They connected those large brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, and Disney to the idea of personal brand.
Ultimately, the message here was that so much goes into creating a positive image for your personal brand that it’s not worth letting one excessive night of drinking and partying or other not-so-positive activities destroy your reputation. It puts things into perspective.
This idea of personal brand can also be applied to social networking and professional development for both students and administrators. You should be careful about the “brand” you’re portraying online through your tweets and status updates. Most of the time, it’s public, unless you’ve locked down your profiles so that only certain people can view your interactions. With that in mind, here are three tips for maintaining a positive personal brand:
You may not quite understand it all yet. No one does. But I would definitely recommend getting out there and letting yourself be known on social platforms. Work your way up to it. You don’t have to dive in completely, but you could definitely learn a lot from others and make great connections.
I know for sure that my involvement with social networking at this year’s NASPA annual conference helped me professionally and personally. I learned a TON. If you’d like to chat more about this concept of personal brand or anything social networking, tweet me @tyachilles.
