• by the end of October: Tutors meet their tutees (1st meeting)
• by the end of January: Tutors meet “at risk” tutees and monitor them
• by the end of March: Tutors will meet their tutees to monitor their progress through the first semester and exam session (2nd meeting). Tutors will remain open to meetings with the tutees, as long as these meeting are scheduled during office hours and the frequency remains reasonable
• by the end of May: Tutors meet “at risk” tutees for the last time

The goal of the Tutoring Service is to assist first-year students, to involve them in the educational process, and to remove potential obstacles to a fruitful study career. There are several common transitional issues that first-year students might face when entering university. Difficult balancing of social and academic demands and pressures, uncertainty about purpose, and difficulty in connecting with fellow-students may complicate students’ progress. Some students may need more attention than others, both inside and outside the classroom (see Quigley, 1997). The first few weeks are crucial for successful integration: failure to assist students promptly may eventuate in drop-out (Christophel and Gorham, 1995). More specifically, we believe that it is worth building a sensitive interviewing process for first-year students at the beginning of the semester and follow-up with students who need more attention. The overall logic is that some of the new students have more significant dispositional barriers than others. Our role is to identify those students, namely, “at risk” students, who are more likely drop out in the first few weeks (or months) of the academic year and assist them so that they stay in the programme.

The aim of this service is to enhance the best use of the unibz trilingual environment, turning our mission to support students into an imperative. Tenured instructors of the Faculty of Economics and Management get a list of first-year students that will be interviewed and assisted through their academic year: various aspects of one’s academic experience - courses, exams, language, exchange agreements, organizational issues and all issues related with one’s learning experience – will be addressed in a spirit of cooperation and support.

The Faculty of Economics and Management will offer a peer tutoring service for freshers. Students have been informed via email about the possibility to become peer tutors.

The selected peer tutors are:

• For the Bachelors
• For the Masters

Every fresher will be assigned to one of these tutors and informed via email.