On the first day of orientation, first-year Maya Hope Giermek went to get breakfast at the Terrace Dining Room. She stopped when she saw the line.
It spanned from Bender Library, up the stairs through the Mary Graydon Center and down the MGC stairs to the dining hall, according to Giermek. The line was almost entirely made up of first-year students who had been prompted by their orientation schedules to get breakfast at the TDR, all at the same time.
Giermek said by the time she got into the TDR, she was irritated and didn’t have time for any of the breakfast options the dining hall was offering.
“I was definitely really irritated,” Giermek said. “Because then I couldn’t get breakfast that day.”
American University rolled out a new four-day orientation style this fall that took place from Aug. 20-24, prompting criticism from some first-year students and orientation leaders. Giermek’s experience on the first day was just one instance where first-years said they felt the rough patches of the new layout.
The new format also came with a new $250 orientation fee. This was the first time AU has charged this fee, according to Elizabeth Deal, assistant vice president and deputy chief communications officer for AU.
In an email to AWOL, Deal said the orientation fee funded programming, meals, welcome gifts, cohort-specific welcomes and excursions for first-years.
Extending orientation was intended to better first-year students’ experience, Deal said.
“The onboarding experience for the Class of 2028 and future cohorts has been significantly enhanced this year as part of our ongoing commitment to improving the new student experience,” Deal said.
Giermek said new students had assigned “eagle groups” which determined their schedules for each of the four days. The schedules included TDR breakfast, group-specific lunch time slots and lecture sessions, with one day set aside for an excursion around Washington.
Despite the additional cost to students, first-year students and orientation leaders reported instances of miscommunication, long waits for meals, gaps in accessibility and issues with Title IX lecture sessions. Some have questioned whether the Department for New Student and Family Programs should use this four-day format in future years.
According to a survey distributed by AU’s New Student and Family Programs, to which 487 out of 1,833 orientation attendees responded, 87.48% of students reported an overall positive experience at orientation. The survey was shared by the AU Communications and Marketing Office. Still, outside the survey, some students reported a number of concerns.
Mandatory Title IX information sessions were meant to educate students about sexual harassment and resources available on campus. Orientation leader Olivia Jensen said Title IX speakers included trigger warnings in the session that orientation leaders viewed a week before, but they did not use them in the presentations for students. That responsibility was put on orientation leaders, according to Jensen.
“We as orientation leaders had to provide trigger warnings for that session prior to entering, because the presenter was not doing them,” Jensen said.
Both Jensen and first-year student Haven Teudt said they remembered the presenter for their group sessions sharing conflicting opinions regarding the definition of consent, especially when alcohol or drug use is involved. Teudt said orientation leaders bore the responsibility of clarifying consent protocol.
“Our group leaders took us outside afterwards to say that they didn’t condone what the speaker was saying and that they would always be available to help us if we needed to contact someone, which was relieving to hear,” Teudt said in an email to AWOL.
Giermek said she thought the presenter during her session didn’t take sexual violence and consent seriously enough.
The university was unable to respond to claims about Title IX in time for publication.
Teudt said she preferred how peer health educators and student volunteers discussed sexual violence prevention in the Empower AU session. Empower AU aims to educate students about sexuality, respect and consent, communication and boundaries and bystander intervention, according to their page on the AU website.
Miles Hazo, another first-year, said he thought the Empower AU session was more engaging and managed to capture the attention of students.
In addition, AU struggled to meet students’ dining needs, according to first-year students whom AWOL spoke to. On the first day, lines for the TDR stretched out the doors of the MGC, and eventually reached past the McKinley Building, according to Giermek.
Giermek said miscommunication may have caused the dining delays. On the first day of orientation, breakfast was written into student schedules as a seemingly-mandatory event that started at 8 a.m., according to Giermek. In reality, Giermek said, students were not required to eat breakfast at the TDR and could go earlier than their schedules said.
Giermek said the limited number of dining options on campus dissatisfied her. She said there were only two places for students to choose from during orientation — one was the TDR and the other was Subway.
Dining issues began the week of Aug. 11, during orientation leader training, according to Jensen.
Orientation staff was invited to serve as the test group for the newly renovated TDR during their training week, according to Jensen and Jimmy Grebenstein, a senior and returning orientation leader. Orientation staff had specific time slots when they could come, regardless of if they had a meal plan, and experiment with the TDR’s revamped operation.
Orientation administrators provided orientation leaders with lunches, but not consistent breakfasts or dinners for at least the first part of the week, Jensen said.
Jensen, who became an orientation leader this year, said orientation leaders had to provide breakfast for themselves for the first two days. As the week progressed, orientation staff received catered dinner, Orientation leader Gabby Arnold said.
During orientation week, first-year student Roman Sckaål said he struggled to make dining plans the first week as someone who eats gluten-free.
“They served the same food for the whole week, which was just nachos at the gluten-free station,” Sckaål said. “So I was kind of struggling to eat food that first week. I was spending a bit more money than expected, but it definitely got better once the school year started.”
The university was unable to respond to claims about dining issues in time for publication.
Dining options have improved since orientation ended, Sckaål said, because of increased TDR hours and dining staff correcting wait times.
Some first-years had a positive experience with orientation dining. Teudt said her experience with the allergen-free station in TDR was encouraging.
“I talked to the kitchen, like the people representing the AU kitchen and stuff like that,” Teudt said. “And they were really helpful.”
Aside from the dining hall, Giermek and other freshmen said the week’s structure lacked opportunities to meet new people during orientation.
“I was expecting it to be more of interacting with other people,” Giermek said. “And it was definitely more just presentation after presentation, not meeting other freshmen.”
Giermek was not alone in saying orientation week was monotonous. Other first-year students voiced dissatisfaction with the long lectures and days.
According to AU’s survey of students, 22% of orientation attendees said they did not feel more connected with the campus community after orientation and 26% reported that they did not have fun.
The days were valuable but tiring, starting early with informational sessions, Sckaål said.
“I felt that it could have been condensed a lot more into maybe one or two days rather than a full [four] day experience,” Sckaål said.
The session topics included safety on campus, community standards, dialogue about diversity and more, spread out across the orientation days. There were also required sessions on Friday for each specific school of study, according to a schedule by Giermek, who attended the Kogod School of Business session.
Full days of mandatory lectures eventually strained first-year attendance, according to the orientation leaders AWOL spoke to. Arnold said dwindling first-year participation frustrated her as she saw numbers drop in her group.
“It’s frustrating as an orientation staff who puts all this time, effort, money, resources into planning all of this to have like five students show up,” Arnold said.
Throughout orientation week, orientation leaders reported working 40 hours or more, with call times as early as 7 a.m. and departure times as late as 7 p.m., according to Arnold and Jensen.
But some orientation leaders, including Grebenstein, said the hours were not significantly more than what they were expecting.
“They had been very clear with us that it would be a full-time commitment that week and to not schedule our other job,” Grebenstein said.
Accessibility efforts during orientation this year also brought in student work. Ethan McBride, a second-year student, said he joined the orientation team to ensure the Office of Inclusive Excellence team was proactively providing physical accessibility and complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“I was doing work, basically checking about the rooms and making sure that each one of them was ADA compliant, no matter what the case scenario would have been,” McBride said.
But McBride said he was not able to be as involved as he wanted due to the confusion of hiring new orientation staff members. He said it was not until the second week of August, about two weeks before orientation, that orientation administrators confirmed he had a position on the team, so he was only able to present his accessibility information to orientation chairs and leaders via Zoom.
Based on a map of accessibility routes made by McBride, orientation leaders were prepared to include disabled students, according to Grebenstein.
“We [Orientation leaders] had trainings beforehand and handouts in our OL binders with almost all the accessible routes we would need to know,” Grebenstein said.
Training week for orientation leaders had a new structure. In the past, orientation training was conducted mostly online with a short in-person component, said Grebenstein, who was an orientation leader one year before. In comparison, training this year lasted a full week, with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. shifts Monday through Friday, according to Arnold.
After Arnold finished the training week and orientation week, she said she believed the new style gave her a chance to connect with the first-year students in her group.
“It felt a lot more impactful than prior years because we got to build relationships with them and help them learn the campus and AU and get introduced in a much more meaningful way,” Arnold said.
Ninety-two percent of surveyed students said orientation leaders were approachable and helpful, according to the survey.
Teudt said shortening the model down to two or three days could be better.
Jensen said she still felt the four-day model was better than what was previously given.
“I feel like I actually made a good, memorable experience meeting with my students and getting them to connect with each other,” Jensen said. “It was easier to do that over four days, rather than a little like 24 hours, or less than 12 hours. So I think that was a positive thing that kind of came out of the whole thing, despite there needing to be some more logistical adjustments with the overall planning.”
Correction: A previous version of the article said Jensen was an orientation leader for three years. She became an orientation leader this year.
This article was originally published in Issue 35 of AWOL’s magazine on November 19, 2024. You can see the rest of the issue here.
