During the 2018-19 academic year, faculty and staff took part in a series of retreats, focus groups, and student interviews to understand first-year students’ experiences better and identify common challenges they face. The top three identified were:

• building a sense of belonging through interpersonal relationships and on-campus involvement.
• navigating the academic transition from high school to college.
• understanding how to identify and utilize campus resources.

To address these challenges, a conceptual framework called Husker Student POWER was developed to identify five elements critical to students’ success. These five elements promote new students’ institutional belonging and academic self-efficacy by intentionally connecting them to curricular and co-curricular experiences that emphasize the following elements:

• Purpose: to help students find, deepen, and achieve their purpose for pursuing higher education.
• Ownership: to honor the diversity of students’ purposes and goals for pursuing a UNL degree and support ownership of their stories and educational journeys in community with peers.
• Well-being: to recognize the importance of supporting students in all nine dimensions of well-being — career, cultural, emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual.
• Engagement: to engage students in experiences (research, leadership, education abroad, career development, community work) that prepare them to excel in a global society.
• Relationships: to build personalized caring relationships with our students and encourage them to build relationships with peers, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members.

These five POWER areas are used across campus to help convey how different university events, programs, and resources support student success.