SUNY New Paltz

As a first-year student I chose this topic because I personally know how the first-year experience was due to COVID-19. Coming into college this was not the experience, I was hoping for at all. During last semester, I barely experienced anything that I thought I was going to as a first-year student. I believe the school could have tried harder to help students to have a great first-year experience whether there was a pandemic or not. This is important because students were excited to go to college after so many years of school, and they are not getting what they expected. It is important that SUNY New Paltz learn from student experiences because then administrators and staff will know what they need to change for upcoming first-year students. This area is so crucial to college students because, yes students want to come to school to further their education, but they also want to get involved on campus hands-on, and because of COVID, students this year could not.

A primary audience for this report should be the residence life administration, and the students. They should be the audience since the students will be able to relate and the administration can make changes for future semesters. This report could be sent to the head of residence life, the president, and the students.

A secondary source that looks promising is “The First Semester of College Has Never Been Stranger” by Marie Fazio, published on The New York Times. This essay may be helpful to my own research because it speaks about how this semester did not go as planned because of the pandemic that we are currently in.

I have already begun looking for other outside sources by knowing that I will be interviewing other students. I will conduct these interviews over text or on the phone due to the circumstances. I will take notes by writing down the most important things the students say during the interview that will help me with my research. I will most likely call on a few friends that also live on campus to compare their experiences with mine.

I am quite confident that I will find sources that relate to my topic because I will interview students that I know for sure did not enjoy their first-year experience as much as they thought they would. I believe I will find very few articles about SUNY New Paltz, so I will have to find some articles about a broader topic. In order to broaden my topic I can search for articles about how COVID impacted students experiences in general and not only in New Paltz.