On Community: Orientation

I've been thinking a lot about what 'community' means, especially in a college like Tembusu, but I've been struggling to find the words to spell my thoughts out. It's a much bigger and complex idea than the word seems to represent, so I'll try to take things in small steps and build up my thoughts on what the Tembusu community means and how it functions.

It seems natural to begin this discussion from the same starting point Tembusu residents have in this domain: orientation. Orientation is essential to the community-building process. The main objective of orientation is to induct new students into the college environment, to introduce them to their peers and to unite them. A lot of activities during orientation deals with "breaking the ice" and "getting to know each other". Sometimes I think of orientation as a period of enhanced social interaction; participants are generally expect and are expected to be open to interacting with new people. More interestingly I think that this interaction in orientation sets the way its participants interact for the rest of the academic year (or semester).... so obviously orientation has a strong bearing on how students in this college later socialize.

As a second-year, the most stark impact orientation has on social interaction is on how relationships are distributed across the college. There are very obvious differences in how the senior-year and freshmen-year students cluster, and that can be attributed directly to the orientation structure of their matriculation year.

The current seniors were grouped randomly for orientation, whilst the current freshmen were grouped according to the five Houses* in Tembusu. Unsurprisingly, student interaction after orientation takes bearing set in orientation. The most obvious expression of this is how most people sit with their orientation group mates during mealtime. Many other activities and interaction seems to be centered around these groupings too. Granted, people are not rigidly fixed to mixing with the people they were mixed with during orientation, but it's largely the trend. And as a bit of a side note, judging from last academic year, the orientation grouping effect seems to wear off slightly in the second semester.

So back to orientation structures. I reckon that this year's attempt to bind the Houses through orientation worked with overwhelming success. The freshmen are really, really bonded within their Houses. I think the house structure really complements the orientation that facilitated this super accelerated bonding. The unintended outcome was that this bonding has made the orientation groups exclusive, that is to say they do not interact outside of their orientation groupings much. This is manifested on two levels.

Firstly, there seems to be a freshmen-senior divide, where seniors in the same house cannot breach the groups formed by the freshmen during orientation. This has led to an interesting shift in dynamics within the houses, because the prominent seniors this semester were individuals who had a significant presence during orientation. The old high-profilers seem to have sobered and retreated this semester.

The second division is inter-House. I think in comparison with the seniors, who had a more random orientation grouping, the current freshmen don't seem to interact and bond much outside of their Houses as well.

So here we have two ways of grouping people in orientation that seems to have a big impact on how relationships are distributed in the college. It seems to primarily cause a trade-off between breadth vs depth of social connections made in the college. The issue is what is optimal for community-building?

Ideally, it is a combination of both. There needs to be strong, meaningful, personal connections within smaller clusters of the college, which in this case can be fulfilled in the House structure. These small cluster connections forms the glue that will bind the college as as whole, something which I might explore in another post. Broad, inter-House interaction is also equally important as well. This allows students to capitalize on being part of a highly diversified college population, that it allows for richer living and learning experiences by virtue of being exposed to different perspectives. Collectively, I believe both types of interaction are essential to synthesizing a distinct culture, identity and community for Tembusu.

Thus, one could frame the two models of orientation as prototype orientation social structures. The model of random distribution allows for students to have (arguably) wider social circles, but appears to compromise on building a strong, unified House spirit. Grouping orientation participants by their prospective Houses has the extreme opposite effect of bonding the Houses to the point of rigidity in individual's social mobility. In the interest of community-building in Tembusu, I would propose to retrain the House grouping structure for future orientations, but not without some changes.

Perhaps the orientation groups can be formed by hybridized sub-Houses. That means we could say, put half of Ora with half of Tancho, and the remaining halves of each House with another House. This format does not even have to be static throughout the orientation; the half-Houses could rotate pairings with other half-Houses throughout the orientation week. Maybe there isn't even a need to split the Houses, but to design orientation activities that encourage inter-House cooperation rather than competition. I think the key is to retain some semblance of House structure whilst encouraging interaction outside these groupings. What is important is that all of us are continually open to making new friendships, regardless of how we were socialized during orientation.


*The houses are divided by levels; every three or four consecutive floors form one house. There are altogether five houses in Tembusu: Ponya, Tancho, Gaja, Ora and Shan.