2025 Transfer Student Success Partnership Conference
Destination Success: Enhancing Degree Pathways and Curriculum
February 14, 2025
UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, Orlando, Florida
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The 2025 Transfer Student Success Partnership Conference, a collaborative gathering of academic leaders, faculty members, and academic advisors and success coaches from DirectConnect to UCF® partner institutions, the Florida College System, the State University System (SUS), and Central Florida public school systems, is designed to support initiatives that enhance degree pathways and curriculum alignment for transfer students success.
Destination Success:
Enhancing Degree Pathways and Curriculum
This year’s theme, Destination Success: Enhancing Degree Pathways and Curriculum, focuses on innovative strategies to ensure successful academic transitions and degree completion for transfer students. Through collaborative sessions and in-depth discussions, participants will explore ways to align curriculum, enhance degree pathways, leverage data-informed practices, and enrich advising and coaching approaches for student success. The conference will feature four concurrent presentation tracks, which are:
Track 1: Initiatives for Seamless Academic Transition
Sessions in this track will focus on efforts, campaigns, initiatives or activities that increase a student’s opportunities for successful transition. Presentations can focus on those activities that result in increased retention, student course momentum, improved graduation or time-to-degree/graduation; aligned course, programs or pathways; completed pre-requisite requirements, improved social/academic integration.
Track 2: Data-informed Transfer Success Strategies
Sessions in this track will focus on examples or best practices of how to use data, artificial intelligence, and researched best practices to inform curricular or pedagogical practices to address transfer shock, or demonstrate how data inform and impact student success.
Track 3: Curriculum Alignment
Sessions in this track include topics that discuss intra- and inter- institutional efforts to align curriculum for foundational courses. Presentations in this track may include horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, or integrated alignment of foundational courses, course coordination efforts of foundational courses, faculty based course interventions, course redesign, and curriculum mapping.
Track 4: Coaching, Advising, and Pathways
Sessions in this track focus more on the impact of effective advising and coaching strategies. Presentations may include effective use of degree pathways, co-curricular supports, best practices and innovative approaches to advising and coaching, transfer readiness, and major readiness.
Featured Keynote
Dr. Xueli Wang
Dr. Xueli Wang (pronounced similar to “Shoo-lee Wong”) is the Barbara and Glenn Thompson Endowed Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Often centering on community and technical colleges, her research spans a range of topics, including students’ success and mental health; transfer pathways; faculty development; teaching and learning; and educational change and innovation. She is the author of “On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways” (recipient of the 2021 Publication of the Year award from the American Educational Research Association’s Postsecondary Education Division), and “Delivering Promise: Equity-Driven Educational Change and Innovation in Community and Technical Colleges” (published in 2024 by Harvard Education Press). In addition to numerous teaching awards, Dr. Wang was honored with the Transfer Champion-Catalyst Award by the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students in 2021, the Barbara Townsend Lecture Award by the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2020, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education’s Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award in 2020. She currently serves as President of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges.
The Joyce Romano Partnership Excellence Award
Deadline for Nominations is
Friday, January 17th, 2025
This award recognizes an individual, institution, team, or community member that exudes the spirit of collaboration and partnership with other transfer institutions in leading and supporting transfer student success.
Visit the Joyce Romano Partnership Excellence Award website for more information, previous award winners, and nomination submissions.
2024 Award Winner: Undergraduate Research Transfer Initiative: Creating Connections between Valencia College and UCF team!
Location Information
UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management
9907 Universal Blvd., Orlando, Florida 3281
If you have any questions or need further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email at tsspconference@ucf.edu.