What is a Senior Year Experience (SYE)?

To fulfill the SYE mission, faculty will develop courses that help students achieve the following goals:

Goal 1: Reflect

Reflect on the significance of your education, values, passions, and previous experiences in your search for meaning and purpose.

• Reflect on the significance of your learning in your major, Integrative Studies and general education courses, immersive experience, and other facets of life.
• Reflect on the interconnections between your education and other experiences.
• Reflect on how your personal values and passions have informed your education, professional development, and other experiences.

Goal 2: Engage

Access the possibilities, resources, and experiences that will propel your education, life path, and work path.

• Discover the personal and professional relevance of Otterbein classes, different majors and minors, general education and Integrative Studies courses, and co-curricular experiences.
• Envision, plan, and complete a substantive immersive experience that nurtures your personal and professional growth.
• Connect to resources that promote academic and professional success, belonging, wellness, and life and work planning.

Goal 3: Anticipate

Imagine the future purposes of the knowledge, skills, passions, and values you’ve developed through academic and individual experiences.

• Anticipate your future obligations as an individual, a professional, a member of diverse communities, and an agent of the public good.
• Anticipate the challenges you may encounter in new contexts and how you will rise to meet them.
• Anticipate how your knowledge, skills, passions, and values will inform your future goals and action steps.

Goal 4: Transition

Prepare for your transition into new personal, professional, communal, and global contexts.

• Prepare for the post-college transition with students across disciplines, doing vital readiness work.
• Develop skills essential to academic and professional success, community engagement, and self-actualization.
• Develop the awareness, knowledge, and skills that foster equity and inclusion in diverse communities and workplaces.
• Understand the importance of creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and professionalism to your work path and life path.

In order to register for a three-credit, traditional SYE course, you must have:

• Completed 90 credit hours of regular coursework.

To register for the two-credit internship SYE course, you must have

• Completed an approved internship the semester or summer before you register for a SYE course,
• Or be scheduled to complete an approved internship during the same semester that you will be taking the SYE course.

To register for a two-credit “Undergraduate Research and Creative Work” SYE course, you must:

• Be completing a distinction project,
• Or be working on a 3-credit capstone project.

Don’t worry so much about choosing an SYE that matches your major; rather, choose something you’re interested in, concerned about, or curious about. Later, as you actually walk into your SYE, it means you need to be willing to:

• Actively confront a problem; engage in an issue; work to gain knowledge; wrestle with ethical choices; and come up with individual and group positions, answers, or solutions.
• Think of yourself as an expert in your discipline and be willing to share your expertise with those outside your discipline.
• Think of yourself as a budding professional, an educated person, and a citizen.
• Think about your education as a whole: how it adds up, how it all relates, how it can be used to live your life.

For questions about the SYE program, contact Program Director Suzanne Ashworth.

• SYE 4211 – Globalization, Society, and Individuals
• SYE 4212 – Engaging with Difference
• SYE 4301 – Communication and Society
• SYE 4302 – High Stakes: The 20XX Presidential Election
• SYE 4402 – Engaging Cultures: Appalachia in the City
• SYE 4403 – Community, Change, and Leadership in Non-Profit Organization
• SYE 4404 – Artists in the Schools
• SYE 4405 – From Bible to Neighbor
• SYE 4406 – Inventing the Self and the Future
• SYE 4407 – Silence and the Golden Years: Engaging the Language and Culture of the Senior Deaf Community
• SYE 4408 – Otterbein’s Tradition of Service and The United Brethren Church
• SYE 4910 – Experimental Course Topics