INFORMATION FOR STUDENTS

This page is dedicated to information new students need to navigate their first year at Ball State.  Refer to the links below, the announcments in the message marquee above, or the space for short announcements to the right.  If you have any questions, do not hesitate to use the email link to the left.  Have a great first year!

Why Freshman Connections?

The purpose of Freshman Connections is to help new students more quickly and more fully become part of our learning community at Ball State.  Our purpose is simply to improve learning.  In a recent summary report on student engagement and retention in postsecondary education, "interaction with faculty positively affected reading comprehension, critical thinking, openness to diversity, and internal attribution of academic success, [while] interaction with peers had a positive effect on mathematics knowledge, openness to diversity, learning for self-understanding, and preference for higher-order cognitive tasks."   Freshman Connections, as a living-learning community, promotes interactions between students and faculty and among students themselves.

What Are the Goals of Freshman Connections?

From the beginning of the program Freshman Connections has adopted the goals of the University Core Curriculum.  Those can be found at the "Core Curriculum" link to the left.  More specifically, Freshman Connections seeks to accelerate the process for new students to learn and succeed at Ball State.  Using both program-wide and team-based planning, Freshman Connections seeks to deepen the contact new students have with faculty, staff, and fellow students in order to improve learning and persistence to graduation.

For further information about Freshman Connections, follow the link to What is Freshman Connections?

FC BUSINESS TEAM TRAVELS TO NEW YORK CITY

Read more about how 46 first-year, pre-business majors traveled with Associate Dean of the College of Business Ray Montagno and faculty member Susan Brudvig to New York City.  Follow the link below to page 3 of the "Ball State Business E-News."