Founded in 2017, Geneseo’s Wildly Important Goal team continues to work to enhance the student experience, now functioning as “WIG 2.0.” The program began with Provost and Vice President for Student Affairs Stacey Robertson six months after she arrived at the college.
The program is based on the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. According to the book summary, the identifiable themes are to focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures or things that help you reach your goal, keep a compelling scoreboard and create a cadence of accountability.
Robertson said that the goals the college deems wildly important are those which help students who are struggling and can provide a sense of belonging on campus.
“A high priority for us is helping students find their home [and] a sense of belonging,” said Robertson. “We want every student who arrives here to have the opportunity to succeed.”
Robertson said she believes that it is important to remove obstacles to student success, which includes working with students who are struggling financially, academically or mentally. The 25 members of the WIG team meet weekly to discuss their future goals to help students succeed.
“We are engaging and working with various programs on campus to ensure that we’re taking a look at the students who are struggling in one area or another,” said Robertson. “We want to ensure that everyone has an equitable opportunity to succeed here.”
The first WIG that the team chose was to increase student retention rates from 86 percent to 88 percent by October 2019. While the team did not reach their goal, Robertson said she feels the learning process was important and that the programs they implemented were still useful for maintaining retention rates.
“We created these measures that we believed would help us to increase retention,” Robertson said. “For example, we focused on academic support services.”
Robertson said the team believed they were able to provide students with more “say,” tutoring revisions based on student feedback divided into four subcommittees: academic support services, curriculum and classroom, professional development and student health and well-being.
“We basically honed those areas over the course of 18 months,” Robertson said. “We met at five retreats, every six months. We would get together and think about ‘where are we,’ and where we want to be.”
According to Robertson, the WIG team began with about 10 people, all of whom represent academic affairs. She said the team realized they couldn’t focus on a true holistic approach to retention without expanding to include more departments.
“While we didn’t meet our retention goals, we hope to focus more broadly on student success. We have started working on what we are calling WIG 2.0. In particular, we are focusing on the goal of ensuring that every single student experiences a comprehensive and individualized transition to college,” Robertson said.
The WIG 2.0 team will be divided into three subcommittees: coordination of care, removing obstacles and the first year experience.
Robertson said coordination of care will focus on the implementation of an early alert system, aiming to make apparent to an advisor when a student may be struggling. Removing an obstacle may assist a student who is switching majors or experiencing difficulties registering.
“The first year experience is very broad from the weeks of welcome and orientation, all the way through to the first year seminar. We have expanded even further with about 25 members on each team,” Robertson said.
This next phase will seek to align with WIG 2.0’s given theme of, what Robertson calls, “failing forward.” This next step will collaborate with the Geneseo Points of Support program, offering students support in urgent moments.
“The idea is, if a student is frustrated because they can’t get answers to their questions, they can reach out to GPS. The student will work with a GPS temporary supporter, who will come to them and say, ‘we’re going to work through this one problem together,’” Robertson said.
Robertson said that the very nature of WIG is to adapt and be responsive to change. The campus community will be notified in the coming weeks about WIG 2.0.