The Real Dirt on Freshman Orientation

Earlier this summer, I had the luxury (if you can call it that) of attending Freshman Orientation. Since this is an accredited university, I may as well grade the event. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it deserved anything higher than a C.

You see, for a freshman, orientation is the big step before classes actually begin. It’s supposed to be the place where you meet future classmates, find out where your classes are going to be, and have an overall view of what life on campus is like. But at my orientation, it seemed that the goal was to bore the freshmen with repetitive information, and basically make us all go to sleep every time we were in the auditorium.

In the beginning, orientation wasn’t that bad, and seeing all of our orientation leaders walking down the aisles of the auditorium to “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West was definitely a plus. I was definitely awake by then.

But things seemed to slowly deteriorate by the minute. After sitting in the auditorium for an extra 15 minutes to listen to our leaders introduce themselves and tell us their majors, we were finally separated into groups according to our colleges to go on a tour of the campus.

Let me just mention that it was incredibly hot and humid outside, and the tour of the campus was complete torture. It was so hot that I don’t think anybody even paid attention to what our leader was telling us. We were forced to walk the whole campus under the burning hot sun of Florida with no water, no air and no golf carts to take us around. They should have given us little fans and bottles of water to at least refresh ourselves a bit. They should definitely do that next year, or otherwise this horrible trend of making all the little freshmen suffer through a campus tour under the sun will make people abandon orientation before completing it. Things couldn’t get any better.

After the 90 minute tour under the hot sun, we were finally led inside to get some A/C. We were all supposed to go to what our leaders called “sessions” – which were little meetings about specific things on campus. The first one that I went to was one called, “Be smart and be healthy!” On my handy brochure, it said that we would find out about how to become a peer educator and the fun ways that you could get involved in the campus community, and also how to build your resume and make a difference during your college years. First of all, they never even mentioned how to become a peer educator. Second of all, they never said anything about how to build our resume. All they did do was tell us the same information we have known since 6th grade: Don’t eat too much junk food, wear condoms and prevent yourselves from STD’s. All I heard was Blah, blah, blah; as if we didn’t know that stuff already, how many more times did we have to listen to that? Next time, I think they should actually focus on the description that the brochure says, or maybe come up with more entertaining games other than playing jeopardy on how to be healthy. What a waste of time.

The next session that I went to was one about how to get involved on campus, which I must say was the best session that I went to. Not only were they actually telling us things that we all might be interested in, but they were giving us a little bit of insight on how to meet people, how to get involved, and just how to have good, clean fun on campus by joining organizations and/or clubs. I actually think I learned something from them, which was good, considering I had felt like I had wasted my time the whole day.

After attending all the sessions, we were all supposed to go back to the auditorium and sit back down to meet up with our leaders. But what we didn’t know is that they had actually prepared something for us – a series of skits that could have not been any funnier. They touched on subjects like racism, relationships and parties. They were all entertaining and actually helpful when it came to situations such as the ones they portrayed. To be honest, the skits were the best part of orientation.

Day two of orientation however, was not quite as pleasant as the first. I should have just brought a blanket and a pillow with me to the auditorium. Not only did they make us sit there for an hour listening to the “oh so, very important" meeting called “Money Matters,” but they kept repeating the same things over and over again. Half of the freshmen there were in deep sleep listening to their iPods and not even caring about what the counselors there had to say. If that meeting was meant to be for the parents, then they should have let THEM listen to it. Not us.

Overall, Orientation was helpful but incredibly boring. They should have tried to interact more with the audience, instead of giving us too much information about everything at once. The only good part about it was finding out that there was a Starbucks on campus. Other than that, I think I could have cared less about what all the people there had to say.