By Perri Moran
Over the course of four days in the middle of August, Edgewood’s new first-year students got to experience what most students in the years ahead of them also got to experience at the beginning of their college journey… orientation.
Some students were nervous about the new campus and people, some were annoyed about having to start school early and on a weekend, and some were indifferent about the first-year routine. But most people, in the end, were thankful.
Anjali Pattanayak, Edgewood’s assistant director of student inclusion and involvement, said she thought orientation went well even with the new format.
Pattanayak said that a conference-style format was introduced to orientation this year to allow students’ voices to be heard. Allowing students to decide what they needed was important because, according to Pattanayak, “every student has their own needs based on where they are at and having those choices allows us to meet them where they are at rather than trying to treat them as a monolithic group.”
An additional change this year was the distribution of student planners. Pattanayak said, “I think that the planner could be incredibly helpful not only for new students, but for returning students as a way of planning events they wish to go to as well as time management.”
With all this new activity, there were a few roadblocks during registration—literally. In addition to the seemingly never-ending construction on Monroe Street, there were “some challenges with the rain and flooding,” according to Pattanayak. This interfered with attendance at Welcome Week and the Involvement Fair.
Perhaps the rain wasn’t the only thing affecting attendance over the four days of activities. Halle White, one of the freshman attendees, thought that orientation could’ve been shortened by a day. “It was way too long,” she said. “By the end, everyone was exhausted.”
Jade Proctor, another first-year student, agreed. She said “the four full days of activity, breakfast to dinner” were “overwhelming.”
Students said they had an overall positive orientation experience. According to White, the experience she gained navigating the campus prior to the beginning of the school year helped her to understand the school and how it worked. She also said she “got to learn more about the core values of Edgewood, and why my class is the class of compassion.”
Proctor agreed. She said she not only felt familiar with the layout of the campus after orientation, but also about the available resources offered by the school. She said orientation helped her meet “lots of people I would see around campus.”
The things students found helpful during orientation, and even the things that they didn’t like, are very valuable information to Pattanayak. “We are always working to improve,” Pattanayak said, “so we did conduct a survey at the end of orientation and also held focus groups to get additional feedback. We actually changed quite a bit of the structure of orientation for this year based on last year’s feedback, so we do take that information very seriously.”
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