While many students who come to IU do so directly from high school, there are always exceptions. The Center for Students in Transition helps non-traditional students, those who are coming back to IU after a break or face other special circumstances, find academic success.
While resources to help non-traditional students existed prior to the start of the center, it was officially established in fall 2016. The center has two advisers, Eric Beckstrom and Sharon Hay.
“We want to encourage students, help diminish the stress they often feel when they are uncertain of what path to take and help them transform that stress into excitement about their education,” Beckstrom said.
The center also helps students looking to change their major from one IU school to another.
“They need to have that additional academic resource in that transition,” said Kyla Cox Deckard, spokeswoman for the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
Michelle Abbott, a parent and IU graduate student, received counseling from Hay at the Center for Students in Transition. As she shared recently in an Inside IU-Bloomington press release, she first enrolled at IU in 2000 but stopped her schooling to get a job. Now, she is pursuing a master’s in accounting.
“When I compare my first time at IU to now, it’s so different,” she said in the press release. “My life revolved around me and only me, and now my life revolves around my family.”
A student can be referred to the center by IU faculty or seek advising on their own. The center focuses on helping students pursuing an undergraduate degree but does have resources available on its website for graduate and other students, Cox Deckard said.
Beckstrom was a Health Professions and Prelaw Center adviser who made the switch to the center because he said he was intrigued by the mission of helping students who are in unusual circumstances.
Beckstrom meets with students during appointments, researches their situations and coordinates with the different departments at IU and other campuses to come up with solutions.
The most common situation the center said it encounters is students who’ve been away from the University for an extended period of time, usually more than five years, who want to complete their degree.
“Oftentimes one conversation or email exchange can help them move forward, and we don’t even need to bring them into SIT,” Beckstrom said. “Other times, they might need a semester or two in SIT as they work toward admission to their new major.”
While the center mostly helps with class and career path counseling, the advisers can also link students to other resources for related issues like housing.
“Our No. 1 focus is the academic,” Cox Deckard said.
The center would also help a student who has to leave Bloomington but still needs to complete their degree.
They also serve students who are not familiar with the many programs on campus and look at their areas of interests and strengths to see where the student would fit best.
“Often an adviser would say ‘I know two programs you really need to look at,’” Cox Deckard said.
Beckstrom said his favorite challenge as an adviser is helping students identify their options, drawbacks and advantages there may be, and aiding them in choosing the best solutions.
“We also want them to know that IU sees them as a complex, unique individual,” Beckstrom said. “One of my personal goals is to help them learn to look beyond degree requirements and checklists and understand the deeper purposes of their undergraduate experience.”
