Survival Guide 2005: One Student's Freshman Orientation Experience

Submitted by EditorialStaff on Sun, 08/28/2005 - 03:48.

Written by Incoming Freshman Melissa Lobel

When you’re younger, you always hear people talking about how you need to do well in school, so that you can get accepted to the college you wish to attend. At the time, college seems so far away and isn’t something you want to even think about. Before you know it, you’re walking across the stage getting your diploma, and after that comes the shortest, yet busiest summer of your life.

When I first got the packet in the mail telling me I was accepted, it wasn’t long before I had to start registering for different things or mailing back forms before I could actually be considered a student. As a freshman one of the things that you need to do is register for SOLAR. For some people, SOLAR is their best friend, while for others it’s their worst nightmare. To sum up what it is, it’s the basis of your academic career at Stony Brook. It’s the place you get your messages about what must be done before you can start there. You can also register for classes or alter the schedule they make for you. Seeing as my orientation date was one of the later ones, friends who have been attending and know more about what needs to get done, told me I could make my schedule myself instead of waiting until orientation. With that said, I spent at least twenty hours trying to make a decent one that could coincide with my work schedule, and also having a decent day. I finally found one that would have worked out perfectly.

About a week or so later, I went to help a friend make his schedule. When I logged into my SOLAR account and clicked to view my schedule, they had changed it back to the original schedule they had made for me with all the wrong classes. When trying to get back in, I was told one was already full. Needless to say, I spent another ten or so hours trying to make a new schedule that would work.

Another thing that needed to be done was filling out a student health form which needs to be mailed in or brought down to the school within thirty days after the first day of classes. There’s also several financial aid papers that need to be filled out as well.

When I finally did end up attending my orientation, unexpectedly it was quite boring. When I first got my orientation date, I was pretty excited. I was expecting to visit different parts of the campus and get to know where all my classes were. I also anticipated having people talk more about different clubs and activities that there were to take part in. Instead of taking an outdoor tour of campus, we stayed in the Student Activity Center the whole time, and rotated ballrooms for the different activities. The only time we left the building was to have our photos taken for our student ID’s in the administrative building.

The basic points of an orientation are generally to help you accomplish a few key things: getting to know your surroundings, getting to meet new people, getting an idea of who is around to help you for different things, learning what the school has to offer, and being told what is expected of you. In my opinion, the only thing I feel was accomplished by having the seven-hour orientation was introducing us to important people of the building and most importantly, our academic advisor. I don’t feel you were able to actually get to know people due to the way it was organized. The only people you really had a chance to get to know were the six other people in your group who you walked around with all day. I also feel they only went into a very small amount of what was offered to both commuters and/or residents. As I mentioned earlier, I believe it is very important for students who are both living on campus and commuting to get acquainted with the area around them and have some idea as to which direction they’re headed. Orientation did not accomplish any of this.

Even though orientation was supposed to end at 3:45 p.m., I ended up leaving a bit earlier due to illness. As a person who has several friends who have already been attending the university for a few years, 99% of the information we received were things I had already known from them. For that reason, I was pretty happy to leave. Given the fact that the next thing on the agenda was to sit in a room for an hour and learn about how to use SOLAR, I was even more happy to not have to stay at the building any longer. After my thirty hour escapade on SOLAR trying to make my schedule, I think I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.