Cynthia Hernandez

Fostering a truly student-centered university environment requires more than good intentions – it demands policies crafted with direct input from, and for the explicit benefit of, the student community. Few understand this more than Cynthia Hernandez, Vice President for Student Success at Texas State University.

Chris Mansfield, GoodCourse’s Client Services Lead, sat down with Cynthia to discuss topics including the value of peer-to-peer learning, the role of orientation in student success, and Texas State’s unique approach to fostering constructive dialogue across political divides.

Cynthia's Journey

Chris: Let’s start with a brief introduction to yourself and your institution…

I’m Cynthia Hernandez, and I’m Vice President for Student Success at Texas State. Our campus is about 30 minutes south of Austin and we also have a campus in Round Rock, Texas. We have about 39,000 students at Texas State, the majority of whom are undergraduates. We are a minority-serving institution; 47% of our students identify as Hispanic, 11% of our students identify as Black or African American, and 42% are first-generation students. Our culture and the way we serve is dedicated to improving access.

Chris: What inspired you to pursue a career in student success?

I’ve been working in the field for almost 30 years now. I started out as an RA and an orientation leader; from the very beginning of my college experience, I knew I wanted to help students navigate the institution and also feel a part of it. I was always drawn to the students who didn't quite know if they fit in, and didn't know if there was a space for them. I felt a responsibility towards those individuals to help them understand that not only were they welcomed at the institution, but that they were valued as well. 

Chris: How can we encourage students to reach across political divides and engage in positive, constructive dialogue?

Texas State has been selected to host the first presidential debate in September. That’s a wonderful opportunity to be able to bring this conversation to students, and intentionally plan to involve them. We want to use that debate as a framework for preparing our students and our university community for building constructive dialogue across difference. For the past several months, we have had different teams working together leading up not only to the debate but then beyond to the election season. We've been partnering with faculty members, and we've already started programming in the spring semester. 

As part of that, our faculty are building modules into their courses, and we’re also bringing in lecture series panelists to be able to help students look at things from a different lens. You also need to make that dialogue intentional. We've been working hard on that, in everything from orientation to residence halls. Our whole structure is focused around community and bringing individuals together. As we build up to the debate, we've explored some things like having spaces or tables to discuss certain issues, or topics that might be relevant to the national debate. Providing a structured format is key to having those conversations in a civil way.

Chris: Students have many demands on their attention. How can you ensure you get your key messages out to as many students as possible?

When we design content, we need to think about how we map information across experiences. For example, when it comes to first-time students, we have about 8,000 new students every year, so we have some real opportunities to embed this conversation into some of our onboarding experiences. As part of orientation, we also have a mandatory First Year Experience course. It is a little harder when you start getting into your experiences for your upper-class students, but you've got to remember they've come through some of those experiences embedded a little bit more into their senior-level courses. 

We’re also thinking about how we’re communicating our expectations of students during orientation programs. We’ve introduced more prospective student days, and we're seeing more people come to attend them. We’re also considering ways to make days for students who have already accepted their offer of admission but still haven't gotten to orientation.

That will help them take care of some logistical things before orientation so they can really focus on getting acclimatized to campus. When we think about intentionality, we need to know what are our touch points with students and understand what programming they need in each space. It's easy to want to front-load everything, meaning students can come out of orientation tired and frustrated. So we need to identify the key things we want them to know and map that alongside the student journey. From the very beginning, we are helping them understand the concept of interdependence – we're helping them develop help seeking behaviors, and normalize them in the community. We all need to lean on each other at different times, and that's okay – we’ll show them how to do that in our community.

‍Chris: What initiatives are you working on when it comes to interacting with students in a peer-to-peer learning model?

We can’t discount what the literature tells us about the importance of peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, and advocacy. Students want to learn from each other and they want to serve other students as well. In terms of capturing the student voice, the peer-to-peer approach has been a critical piece of what we do. We focus on a lot of quantitative factors right in our student success work, but the way that is most effective is when we're coupling that with the stories and voices of the students themselves to help us really understand and bring to life the numbers that we're seeing and give us insight on how to best serve students. 

Chris: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

There are a couple of things. The first is really centering the student in the experience, and making sure everything you do supports that – including identifying barriers to success. The second thing is to remember that if you get involved in a program, it’s not your personal project – it belongs to the university. You are here to steward that program on behalf of the institution and with the interests of the students in mind.