Early Impacts on Retention and Curriculum After Introducing A First-Year Experience Course

The ever-increasing integration of technology into everyday life has abstracted away the fundamental principles taught in Electrical and Computer Engineering. For many students, this leads to a disjunction between what they identify their career paths as being, and the trajectory they are currently on. This leads the students to choose other majors and career paths which they perceive as more instant gratification and realization of what they want in their careers. This paper summarizes the success in not only the initial retention of students, but positive curricular impacts that a new First-Year, First Semester experience course offers. By providing seed experiences for students to have initial successes in complex system design and providing a broad background of topics, students grow their ECE identity. The motivations, approaches, and initial results from this paper can aid those who are struggling with student retention/motivation in this rapidly evolving technological landscape.