Many teams engaged with issues of importance to the U-M student community . One focused on Counseling and Psychological Services ( CAPS ), an organization on campus that provides students with access to mental health care , and specifically their new initiative , “ Leaders at their Best ,” to promote positive psychology practices . They found students were generally not aware of this program , and recommended more promotion , targeting certain groups that would be more receptive to this topic , and increased effectiveness of promotional material .
Five of our OS seniors focused on the University of Michigan Career Center ( UMCC ) and whether it is meeting the needs and expectations of LSA students . They found that while students were generally satisfied with UMCC , satisfaction was greater for students in Ross or Engineering who used their collegespecific career centers . Additionally , they found that many LSA students were not aware of the career center , and therefore not using it . Thus , they developed recommendations to improve awareness of the UMCC and strengthen the offerings .
Another team focused on how training of residential staff could be improved to better support students living in residential halls . Based on their analysis , they recommended smaller , interactive trainings to increase interest in training and retention of information . They further advised that more training time should be spent in individual buildings — both to prepare new members for building-specific responsibilities and to encourage more bonding between building members .
A group of OS seniors brought their own interests in community engagement in their project to explore the positive and negative effects of making a service-learning course graded . They found no decline in satisfaction and motivation for students between credit / no-credit and letter graded semesters . However , even though instructional staff felt the grading helped to legitimize the class , they struggled with differentiating student effort with grades . Thus , the team developed recommendations to better support instructors as they worked to support students ’ learning through service while also differentiating students through grades .
Last , but not least , we had one team study the OS program itself . They explored how the internal perception of the OS program is affected by the group cohesiveness and embeddedness of OS students . They found that for the average OS student greater cohesiveness and embeddedness in the program was related to higher satisfaction . They also found that while a strong community is positively perceived as being an essential attraction to and perceived strength of the OS program , the social network amongst students is not as strong as perceived by the community . The average OS junior is not known by 69 % of their junior classmates and the average OS senior is not known by about 41 % of their senior classmates . Rather than the OS community consisting of one large network , where everyone knows each other , it seems that instead most students have built strong ties with around 5-7 OS students and weak ties to others in the program .