Orienting Orientation

Hello one and all, exams are finally over! Hope yours went well. Anyway, I thought it would be good to get back to the discussion on orientation. As mentioned in my previous post, many seniors seem to have a certain disappointment in the current juniors for not having contributed as much as expected. Somehow, this has been attributed to the design of the their orientation program.

I am not even sure how that makes sense at all, but the line of argument is: grouping participants according to their future Houses during orientation predisposes them to be under-contributing members of the college. Obviously there are missing premises there but I can't find them.

And, as I mentioned in that last post, these expectations seem unfair to begin with.

But back to the design of the orientation program. I have discussed this briefly in another post, but given the upcoming orientation, I reckon some points are worth rehashing in greater detail. As far as my observation goes, I think that orientation is useful for shaping interaction patterns between residents. The one thing that orientation has been very successful in achieving is forging very tight-knit intra-group relations, at least for the first semester. In the last orientation, groupings were formed according to the five Houses, and that seemed to reinforce and prolong this initial bonding.

This grouping system appears to be problematic, though not for the reason mentioned above. The problem starts when these groups become exclusive, meaning, members of these groups become reluctant (or unmotivated?) to interact with other people outside their group. Perhaps this could correlate with a certain lack of initiation in contributing to the college (because they become too comfortable in their groups?), but that's stretching it. Regardless, being exclusive goes against community-building and the college's motivation for maximal diversity.

However, if such is the problem, then it is not unique to the current first-years in Tembusu. This is a problem fundamental to the structure of orientation: the inherent objective of orientation groups is to construct strong group-identities, but often at the cost of larger scale cohesion. Individual groups may know and get along with one another, but tend to function independently.

So I propose that orientation be restructured, according to the following objectives:

1. To create opportunities for incoming freshmen to get to know each other
2. To establish a sense of belonging to the college community

I think the key achieving both objectives is to structure the orientation program in a way that prevents exclusivity from developing in groups. Right now I have two ideas on how to do that.

One way is to break the fixed group structure. This can be done by rotating people across groups, or shuffling subgroups to make larger groups. The benefit is that participants will get to interact with a wide range of students. Hopefully this structure can even encourage Tembusians to continue mixing and mingling even after orientation. The downside is that the depth of relationships formed at orientation might be compromised... though I suspect that this probably won't stop close friendships from forming anyway, so maybe it's not a huge deal.

The other idea is to make the games collaborative rather than competitive. When activities are competitive, groups naturally want to distinguish and dissociate themselves from other. However, by making activities collaborative, groups would seek to work together, hence get some inter-group bonding going. In this instance, participants have more time together in their groups to develop more intimate friendships, unlike the dynamic group structure. However, such activities would take a lot of creativity and planning.

What would be even more ideal is to use a combination of both models: a collaborative orientation program with a dynamic group structure. But even that seems quite a tricky feat to organize, much less to get enough people to jump on board with.

Anyway, I've said my portion. I look forward to what the orientation committee comes up with.