Background
Since the inception of the Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship programme (VCS) at NMMU in 2010, the School of Accounting (SoA) has drawn proportionally the largest number of bursary holders for this programme per annum. Planning a programme to give specific attention to these high potential students commenced in 2011, and as from 2012 all the VC Scholars in the SoA participated in the first version of a specially designed development programme with a key focus on helping them achieve the 75% weighted average, as required by VCS policy. In 2014 this project was re-designed to include other top performing students in the SoA (e.g. Tegkor bursars) as well as NMMU VC’s scholars from other faculties, to constitute a group of 160 students.
Project Description
Unlike most academic development interventions, which are aimed at under-prepared, or under-achieving students, this project shifted the focus to key success factors for (potentially) high performing students.
The key dimensions of this development project were academic enhancement; professional development; personal/leadership development; as well as developing a sense of social responsibility and global citizenship. The “vehicles” of these developmental dimensions varied from personal and group mentoring (academic), engagement with the profession (professional) to active participation in leadership events and social “outreach” projects.
Each of these dimensions represents an aspect or aspects of engagement and – seen together – they form an interesting cluster of engagement activities over all four NMMU engagement areas, involving an intricate web of both internal and external engagement partners.