Vanderbilt Visions

Vanderbilt Visions is a one-semester, university core program that mentors first-year undergraduates as they confront the social, academic, cognitive, and cultural transitions of leaving high school and entering the complex environment of a private research university. First established in Fall 2006, Vanderbilt Visions is effective in helping first-year students...

• create peer networks spanning all four undergraduate schools
• lay the foundation, developed further by students' formal courses of study and their Faculty Heads of House in The Commons, for building the habits of mind that support academic and cognitive excellence at Vanderbilt
• increase their knowledge of university norms and resources
• strengthen connections outside the classroom to faculty members and their diverse perspectives
• encounter new opportunities for mentoring by faculty and peers

Each Vanderbilt Visions group is led by a partnership of a faculty member recruited from the instructional faculty of the university and an upperclass undergraduate peer mentor recruited by the student organization VUcept. The Faculty VUceptor and Student VUceptor together create strategies of mentorship for a group of seventeen first-year students selected from the ten Houses of The Commons. Visions groups meet in The Commons Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday to participate in a twelve-week syllabus of hour-long, small-group discussions and activities that address the transitions they are experiencing as first-year students. Groups exercise significant autonomy in organizing themselves. Faculty Heads of House attend Visions groups meetings as guests, participants, and mentors.