The beginning of college is marked by a scene of loosely organized chaos: a horde of stressed out first year students and overly aggressive tiger-moms rampage through Denver, pillaging local Walmarts and storming through crowded dorm hallways in a desperate attempt to cram all of the gear from their overpacked cars into even smaller dorm rooms. It’s like watching someone trying to fit a square peg into a round hole; it probably won’t work unless you try really, really hard.
The chaos of move-in week is nearly unavoidable, yet DU tries to provide at least some amount of structure through their Discoveries Orientation program, which aims to mitigate the overwhelming process of moving into college.
Despite minor complaints, the Discoveries Orientation program successfully provides order to this otherwise disorderly week through organized schedules, events and orientation groups; however, there are still some areas in need of improvement.
Beginning with the complaints about orientation week, some of the larger issues that floated around the freshman student body revolved around schedules being too busy, general inefficiency and a messy registration process.
The thought process for having full schedules is to keep students busy and out of trouble, and to try to introduce them to campus life at DU in the short timespan of a week. While this idea worked to some degree, DU seemed to have overcorrected and instead made the schedule too busy for students to handle. The schedule induced fatigue on the class of 2022, driving students to merely want time to themselves.
There was too much “go, go, go,” with activities planned back-to-back starting at eight in the morning every day. The DU staff is going to need to either cut back on activities or make more activities optional for next year’s orientation week to relieve the level of fatigue on the already overwhelmed students.
Moreover, multiple of the events that they packed the schedule with were run surprisingly inefficiently, including the Pioneer Passage, the large DU picture and especially registration. Both the Pioneer Passage and the DU picture took twice as long as they should have as a consequence of a lack of an ability to quickly get students in their seats or where they needed to be on the field.
The registration process was marred by disorganization, general confusion on where to be or what to do, tardiness and even false fire alarms. Students were randomly selected for registration times, with priority times going to Honors students and athletes, which resulted in students randomly drawing the short end of the stick and not being able to get into the classes they wanted.
In some shape or another, the registration process, and other such large events will need to be improved. Perhaps the individual colleges could handle the registration or students could register with their assigned orientation groups instead of having everyone cram into the library.
Regardless of these minor complaints, the program as a whole was indeed a success. The assigned orientation groups allowed students to meet other students, have their questions answered and get orientated with campus in a structured method.
The Orientation Leaders and professors that were paired with these groups alleviated the well known fear of the unknown among first year students. The schedule included events that were both enjoyable and useful, ranging from block parties, a Rockies game, a hypnotist show and an interactive play on sexual assault.
Orientation week was a success, and should the aforementioned issues be resolved, it will be even more of a well-polished process next year.
