Who are CSUN Students?


 2.5 WHO ARE CSUN STUDENTS?

Student Voices

Our students are amazing. Perhaps at one point you were even a CSU student yourself.  If you have never worked in the CSU or within a community college system you might discover some nuanced differences in the path our students must navigate as compared to your prior experiences. One powerful way to connect with your students is to listen to their stories, learn about their perspectives, and cultivate an environment where their existing strengths are valued. We believe a greater sense of belonging and student success can result with these efforts.

What I Wish My Professor Knew

In Spring 2021, CSUN students contributed to a program called "What I Wish My Professors Knew" to help faculty understand how their teaching practices and policies could contribute to their experiences at CSUN. Emerging topics included building community, syllabus and course design, transparent assignments, active learning, equity, and sharing resources. View the full Season 2 playlist here as well as the previous season Links to an external site. on our YouTube page.







Student Experiences and College Success

Teaching at CSUN is a treasured and privileged experience. Give yourself this first year to really listen to our students and understand what they are experiencing and navigating. Rigidity and overcontrolling approaches, especially in this unique moment, are likely to backfire. Find commonalities, build community and find ways to personalize the learning experience for all. Faculty who complete our programming are sharing with us the deep level of empathy and understanding that is emerging for them resulting with a pathway for effective learning to unfold.

It might not look like much, but the smallest ways that you show up for our students have an immense effect on their sense of belonging in college. We can help shift students from a fixed mindset, where their daily experiences are viewed as evidence for not belonging in college, into a process mindset, where they view belonging as a process that develops over time and over which they have some control. 

The video below features a group of CSUN students speaking candidly about their lives and experiences at CSUN.

 

 

Data About CSUN Students

CSUN has a diverse student population spanning different ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. Did you know that more than half of our undergraduates are the first in their immediate family to seek and obtain a degree from a four-year institution?  Learn and discover how awareness of that and the varied identities our students hold is relevant and beneficial.  A colorblind approach that claims race/gender/etc. has nothing to do with what and how we teach will eventually be obvious; students don't leave their identities "at the door" when they learn. 

What do we know about our students, and can I look up this information myself?

Yes! We are fortunate at CSUN because one of our campus leaders, Institutional Research Senior Director Janet Oh, advocated for us to adopt a dashboard tool which allows us incredible access to data about the characteristics of our students, rates of graduation and retention, and countless other data points and data reports.

🍬You are in for a treat!

Our partners in the Institutional Research (IR) office understand that it might take you a while to settle into your new job and start exploring CSUN's resources. With this in mind, they created an exclusive dashboard for CSUN new faculty to facilitate your access to important data and metrics that will help you get familiar with the CSUN student population. Select the image to start navigating the content curated for new faculty on the CSUN Counts website.

 Dashboards for new faculty landing page 

Institutional Research's CSUN Counts website for new faculty 

What if I need student data for a grant proposal?

What is especially nice about these open access dashboards, is that if you find yourself applying for a grant, you can quickly access much of the data you may need by using these dashboards.  There are also additional dashboards available to dive deeper into data about our students that are available to the CSUN community only (accessed with your CSUN login credentials).

What if I need help learning how to use these dashboards?

If data is not your jam, or if you looked at these dashboards and don’t know where to start, we get it. Institutional Research and Faculty Development team up together to provide professional development and workshops for faculty to learn how to navigate these dashboards. In fact, at some point you'll meet Grishma Bhavsar who holds an IR-FacDev position dedicated to organizing these efforts.