The jump from high school to a Dartmouth course load can be daunting. The deadlines stack up, and the study habits that used to be enough no longer are.
William Kiker ’29 came to Dartmouth from a public high school in Florida. The rigor became clear within his first few weeks.
“In high school, the work was not anywhere near as rigorous and difficult as what I’m doing at Dartmouth,” he says. “It was very easy to just ‘vibe.’ If it turned out we had a test and I had totally forgotten, I basically remembered enough content to succeed. But you can’t really do that at Dartmouth. You need to be much more deliberate about staying on top of all your academic work and deadlines."
So Kiker enrolled in The Strategic Student, the first of three courses that make up Learning at Dartmouth, an expansive program run by the Academic Skills Center that helps undergraduates sharpen their study skills and build support networks on campus. Students who complete a Learning at Dartmouth course receive one of their three required wellness credits.
“In most secondary schools in the U.S. K through 12 system, there is very little emphasis on process-based skills, if any at all,” says Rhi Suarez, who oversees the Learning at Dartmouth program as assistant director for student transitions and persistence. “We’re taught what to learn, what to memorize. The focus is not about how to study most effectively, to identify your strengths as a learner.”
This gap shows up once students get to college, Suarez says, because their days are no longer structured by back-to-back classes, nightly homework, and family support. They struggle with procrastination and time management, and often lack the tools to ask for help and build support networks.
That’s where Learning at Dartmouth comes in. What started decades ago as a single lecture-based course for first-year students–the only no-sweat wellness course in a sea of P.E. offerings–has grown into a seminar-style program that teaches skills to students at every stage of college.
The program teaches students the academic skills they need to succeed and also shows them how to nurture supportive relationships and be their own cheerleaders, habits that carry into life after graduation.
“We want students to become compassionate coaches, coaching themselves through failure and seeing it as a normal, information-rich part of the learning experience,” Suarez says.
One course becomes three
Retooling and expanding the program was the brainchild of Carmen Rodriguez, associate director of the Academic Skills Center.
A few years ago, she restructured what was then a fall lecture-style class called Learning at Dartmouth to a full-fledged program with three course offerings that ran from September to June and reached students in the middle and end of their college careers: College 101 in the fall, The Mindful Academic in the winter, and Navigate Your College Journey in the spring. Rodriguez shifted classes to a seminar-style format, capped enrollment at 22, and added a peer facilitator to further center the student experience. Suarez then rebranded College 101 to The Strategic Student, swapped The Mindful Academic with Learn to Lock In, and shifted the Navigate Your College Journey course to the summer term.
“These changes give students more agency over their learning and help them create community in the classroom, as well as enable the classes to tackle specific themes and allow us to speak to a broader audience,” Suarez says.
These iterative redesigns are already paying off. In the coming academic year, Suarez expects Learning at Dartmouth to serve 90 students, a 50% increase over the previous two years. And even after expanding capacity by nearly a third for this past summer’s Navigate Your College Journey, she says it still filled within the first week of the term. Learn to Lock In also filled to capacity last winter, so Suarez plans to open a second section this coming winter.
Learning to sit with discomfort
The Strategic Student, geared toward first- and second-year students and transfer students, teaches strategies for academic and personal wellness. Students develop their capacity for self-reflection and strengthen connections with faculty, staff, and alumni. The course includes hands-on skills labs and panels with partners like the Counseling Center, Dartmouth Peak Performance, the Student Wellness Center, and faculty from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
When teaching process-based skills, keeping students engaged matters, Suarez says. She uses BuzzFeed-style quizzes like “What kind of planner are you?” to help students identify their organizational styles and nail down plans for tracking assignments.
“The main thing I wanted to take away from the course was a more structured way to go about organizing my academic work,” says Kiker.
Suarez also works mindfulness into the course. “I guide students through a test guided imagery meditation before we discuss test preparation strategies,” she says. “I also invite Dartmouth’s mindfulness project manager, Michael Krass, to speak to the class about the influence of mindfulness on increasing energy, focus, and endurance on tasks and minimizing procrastination.”
The Strategic Student is also aimed at teaching students to get comfortable with failure. Suarez introduced an activity she calls “failure bingo,” where students connect over shared disappointments, “whether it’s a relationship not working out, submitting an assignment too late, not getting the grade they wanted, or not getting into an organization they wanted,” she says. She’s also considering a segment where students write “failure resumes.”
The next course, Learn to Lock In, focuses on beating procrastination, and is the brainchild of Suarez and Sarah Olson, assistant director for academic enrichment and learning in the Academic Skills Center.
“This is the ideal class for students who avoid things that they care a lot about or leave things until the last minute,” Suarez says. “Perhaps they have felt that it has worked for them in the past (they claim to work better under pressure) but are now feeling like this is not sustainable, and certainly it is not going to be sustainable post graduation.”
The course helps each student break down which part of initiating, sustaining, or completing a task is hardest for them, and offers a personalized plan for getting past it. Weekly community work sessions draw on the Pomodoro Technique, a structured time-management method. Students bring assignments they’ve been putting off and work in focused 25-minute sessions punctuated by five-minute breaks.
As a co-instructor in the course, “I would also tackle things I was putting off,” Suarez says with a laugh. “It helped students see that this is not just limited to the academic experience. There will be plenty of things in their professional and personal worlds that they don’t want to do that they will need to do. Them witnessing us instructors sit with that discomfort, too, helped hold them accountable.”
Building the network
The third course, Navigate Your College Journey, is designed for sophomores in their summer term. The most individualized and self-directed course in the series, it combines live sessions with self-paced work. Students work one-on-one with professional coaches from the Academic Skills Center and start building support networks across campus through required in-person activities: taking a professor to lunch, meeting with the undergraduate dean, and connecting with the Dartmouth Center for Career Design. Twice during the term, they join hourlong “reflection circles” to talk through their experiences and share lessons.
One student this summer praised the coaching sessions in particular. “I would consider having more sessions beyond the required amount. The value of having someone to talk to, of having a community, is vast.”
The course relaunched this summer with changes based on feedback from the Academic Skill Center’s student advisory board. Board members had pointed out that sophomore year is when students’ majors kick into high gear and many start thinking about junior-year summer internships. Students’ academic paths begin to diverge from their friends’ around this point, and building relationships with campus partners matters more. So Suarez turned the personal reflection requirement into a communal activity, to help students feel more connected to their peers, and made the meetings with professors and the dean required rather than optional.
“I’ve had some really interesting conversations with students who have said, ‘I purposefully stayed in this class because, even though it makes me uncomfortable to connect with the career center or to take my professor to lunch, knowing that I have to do it for this class to get credit helps me take that leap,’” she says. “So it really helps those students remain accountable to those goals that they have for themselves, especially as they approach their junior years.”
The program is one part of a larger effort to connect the support around students, says Scott Pauls, interim dean of undergraduate education.
“Learning at Dartmouth connects students to the people and offices across campus who can help them grow academically, personally, and in their careers,” he says. “The pieces are meant to work together, so a student who learns to ask for help in one class knows how to ask for it everywhere else.”
Suarez has bigger community-building plans, too. In the fall, she plans to invite Learning at Dartmouth alums back as panelists to share their experiences with first- and second-year students taking the classes for the first time. She also hopes to expand support and mentorship for international students by deepening connections with the International Student Experience Office, First-Generation Office, and Native American Program.
The feedback that means the most to Suarez has less to do with study skills than with how students treat themselves.
“The best takeaway for me is that students walk away with more patience and more self-compassion, and they approach their challenges with curiosity instead of blame, because that’s going to help them seek out support when they need it. And that’s going to help them persist to graduation and beyond.”