The traditional five-day Welcome Week is gone and has been replaced by a three-day Fall Welcome. In short, it’s now meetings, events, a college colloquium, programs, an open house and a convocation one after the other.
In the midst of all of that students need to purchase books, attend an interview with their floor mentor, participate in a floor dinner and experience a few icebreakers with the people they’ll be living with for the next nine months.
In all, the hustle and bustle, a sense of community needs to be established and MSU’s large campus needs to be shrunk.
Introduced to MSU students in fall 2009, the three-day Fall Welcome was not quite long enough for biochemical engineering freshman Matt Peyser.
“It didn’t seem long enough to go out and get used to the campus,” Peyser said. “With a few extra days, I could have walked around campus more, got to know the bus routes, got to know more people and been able to navigate campus better.”
His statements should be taken to heart.
Finding the proper balance between incorporating the events of Fall Welcome in a less hectic schedule, while at the same time lowering incident rates needs to be the focus for next year.
At this point, it can be assumed Welcome Week as we knew it will never return. In a few years, three days will be the norm and most students will accept it without question.
Shortening the week, however, does not address all the issues at play during Fall Welcome.
By subtracting two days, MSU has found an artificial way to decrease the amount of shenanigans on campus, but really has not dealt with the foundation of the problem. It’s the culture of students — incoming and current — that disrupts the flow of Fall Welcome. Shortening the time students have on campus naturally would reduce the incidents that can happen.
That’s good news, but if the cause stems from a shorter Welcome Week, other long-term factors might not receive the attention they need. In other words, the student who doesn’t get in trouble the first week still has ample opportunity the rest of the school year to commit multiple infractions.
Furthermore, the shorter week makes it more difficult for students who use their time constructively, in essence punishing the responsible for infractions committed by the irresponsible.
As it stands, three days is too little time to get everything accomplished and prepared for the start of a successful school year. Asking freshmen to attend all 28 events scheduled on this year’s Fall Welcome — not including classes — is too demanding.
Freshmen are going to get lost, that’s inevitable. Most are going to be unfamiliar to the routine of college life, but perhaps they don’t have to be stressed before they even get a chance to take a look at their first syllabus.
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