Two Orientations Down, Four to Go!

Time flies during Orientation season and 2011 is no exception.  Somehow, we’ve already rocked two Orientation sessions this summer and things are going pretty daggone well.  I thought I'd share the basic shell of how the whole day goes down, as it's a pretty big piece of what we do around here.

Our first Orientation (of six) was held on June 16.  We had about 125 students in attendance and more than 200 pictures taken during the event.  During our second Orientation (June 29), we were short staffed and  took zero pictures.  So all of the pictures below come from the first one.

Orientation begins with check-in, where students are greeted by a few enthusiastic and happy Orientation Leaders (OLs) outside of Wilks.

The Welcome Crew, ready to go!

 After a hearty welcome, students are ushered inside to pick up their nametag, folder, and a Miami Hamilton drawstring bag.

A glimpse of check-in

 After receiving these materials, students proceed to the Student Involvement Fair, during which they can visit tables set up by Miami Hamilton student organizations (aka student orgs).  This is usually the first introduction to student involvement that new students see, so the information they get is pretty basic.  Our goal for this part of the program is to show students: “Hey!  We have student organizations here!  With real people in them!  You should join one and be awesome like us!”.

A few students stop to learn about Campus Activities Committee

At this point, the students head into the Conference Center to hear from a few speakers.  As the Director of Student Activities and Orientation, I say a few words to welcome them and talk about the schedule a wee bit.  Then they hear from the Regional Campus Dean, Dr. Mike Pratt (or another dean in his place), and the president of our Student Government Association, Jeff Gambrell.

Me on the left, Dr. Pratt in the middle, and Jeff on the right

 Jeff certainly got the crowd’s attention with his superhero attire (more on why he looks like a crazy person in a later post).

We like to keep people guessing, so after the welcome talks, we have all the students stand up and participate in a rousing icebreaker called EXTREME Rock, Paper, Scissors.  And it’s awesome!

Basically, we have each student stand up and partner with someone they don’t already know.  They introduce themselves and then play best out of three Rock, Paper, Scissors.   The winner of each pair then finds a winner of a different pair, while the loser (ahem, er, non-winner?) becomes the winner’s personal cheerleader.  It goes on and on, with each winner finding another winner and their cheering squad growing larger and louder until we have half the room rooting for one person and the other half of the room rooting for another person.   As you might guess, it gets LOUD in the conference center.  Very loud.

Rock, Paper, Scissors in full swing!

After Rock, Paper, Scissors, students find their Orientation Leader groups and head on out for some getting-to-know you time. 

It seems to me that there are four types of people at Orientation:

• Those who love icebreakers
• Those who hate icebreakers
• Those who think they hate icebreakers but actually like them
• Those who don't know what the heck an icebreaker is

Even if breaking ice isn't your thing, we think it's super important to at least take a few minutes and actually introduce yourself to the folks that you will be spending the next 3+ hours with (aka: the point of an icebreaker).  Our Orientation Leaders decide on their own which icebreakers to play with their group, and we've seen some fun ones over the past few years.  Some of the more popular ones are "Five Fingers" icebreaker, M&M icebreaker, and the Question Ball.   Here's how the Five Fingers Icebreaker works:

After the OLs have successfully broken the ice (or after 15 minutes, whichever comes first), they start the actual meat of the program.  We have four rotating sessions including:

• Campus Tour:  OLs take students on a mini-tour of campus
• Housekeeping:  Students get their student ID card, complete paperwork for their parking pass, and take a little tour of the Rentschler Library.
• MyMiami: Students log in to computers in the lab with their unique ID and password and hear about all the nitty gritty "computer stuff" they'll need to know as a new student.
• Getting Involved / Mingle Mingle:  Students watch a brief video about getting involved and fill out a sheet indicating which organizations they are interested in the most. 

Each of these sessions is about a half hour, but right smack in the middle of the two, we have a POPSICLE BREAK!  Yay!  It's just about 20 minutes of "let's take a break from this heat and this moving around and just eat a popsicle (or several, in the case of some people).

A few Orientation Leaders indulging in a cool popsicle treat!

We cap the day off with a breakout session (no pictures, sorry).  Students select from  four topics and attend a 30 minutes breakout session to ask questions and learn from an expert on the subject. The topics include:

• Academic Expectations
• Choosing a Major
• Finding the Answers
• Financial Aid

They've all been very successful and popular with the students this summer.

After the students leave, the OLs come back to the Conference Center to help clean up and take massive amounts of group photos. For example:

Yes, they are as fun as this picture leads you to believe.

So there you have it.  Orientation in a nutshell.  Actually that was probably larger than a nutshell.  Regardless, I hope you can tell how much fun we have and what an awesome group of Orientation Leaders we have!  Maybe you'll get to meet some of them in more depth soon...