Chloe Lew: Undergraduate Student Initiated Education needs more publicity

Sitting in lecture it’s easy to daydream about teaching your own course in something more interesting. But few students on campus actually know about Undergraduate Student Initiated Education. Through the program, upperclassmen can design and facilitate a seminar for their peers.

Given the value of both a teaching experience for facilitators and a peer learning experience for seminar students, UCLA’s student-led seminar program has a regrettably small and easy-to-miss presence on campus.

The quiet existence of the program is especially obvious when contrasted to the similar 150-seminar DeCal program at UC Berkeley. In order to create a presence across campus, the program needs to push for greater publicity among the student body and for resources to cater to more students.

The desire for seminar-formatted courses is clear, as seen by the competitive grab for classes in the Fiat Lux program. The Fiat Lux program, which offers faculty-taught seminars to mainly freshman students, is 200 seminars strong, annually, and is backed by administrative as well as donation funds.

Seminars are a favorite among students because they allow students to explore specialized passions in a setting far removed from a stuffy lecture hall but are more structured than a casual conversation. Student-led seminars give topics as far-reaching as student-athletes and “The Lord of the Rings” equal attention.

Part of the argument for keeping the program small is keeping the quality of the individual courses high. But although a competitive edge is vital for success, expanding Undergraduate Student Initiated Education would not come at the expense of the program’s quality.

Partnered with greater promotion of its applications and seminars, the program would be able to accept more applicants from a larger and stronger pool, simply by virtue of greater diversity.

After all, the quality of a program is far less relevant when nobody even knows it exists.

Nicole Malek’s late-night discussions about “Mad Men” turned into a seminar course she led as a student facilitator. As a facilitator, the fourth-year English student led weekly discussions about “Mad Men” with her seminar students following the course plan she developed with her faculty mentor and through the program’s preparatory class.

When Malek told her friends about her seminar, they initially assumed it was her own endeavor. Malek had to explain the opportunity existed through an established program, just as a friend had to explain to her before.

And while Malek said teaching her own seminar has been one of her favorite experiences at UCLA so far, she agreed the program is not as well known as it should be. At UC Berkeley, a similar program with an established presence on campus successfully hosts 10 times the number of seminars per semester that our program does.

Matthew Kirschenbaum, a UC Berkeley student-facilitator, said the large size of their program, DeCal, emphasizes not onlyhow important it is for students to learn from one other, but also the integration of the program into the normal student experience.

There are a lot of aspects to DeCal that could be debated as superior to UCLA’s program – quick preparation process, greater acceptance rates – but the true merit of Berkeley’s program is its campus-wide presence.

For instance, Berkeley hosts a “DeCal Expo” as a publicity platform for its student seminars. Undergraduate Student Initiated Education could create a tabling event, much like the Enormous Activities Fair, for student seminars.

Student-led seminars are not for everybody, but at Berkeley, facilitators carry the confidence that fellow students are aware of the program, and so the experience is missed only by a lack of interest, as opposed to a lack of opportunity.

The idea of peer learning is a good one, but to gain a spot on a UCLA student’s bucket list, UCLA’s program must show the ambition to grow beyond its current state.

And for programs like Undergraduate Student Initiated Education, publicity is key.