<p>My D didn't like her room assignment. She called housing and was brushed off. I then called on her behalf, they gave her a new assignment on the spot to the dorm she wanted. I have also called to get her ID, and various other info, never had any problem. Now, I haven't called since she started school, no reason to. But I wouldn't hesitate to call if need to, especially since I am paying the tutition.</p>
<p>Re: birthday cake. My DD's residential college coordinator picked up a cake for her at a local bakery. Sweet, kind, and definitely the personal touch. I mailed her a check just for the price of the cake. She said she was happy to do it and it was on her way home from work.... :)</p>
<p>I love that Cake Kit idea Jeepmom. I can see my boys doing that--with the help of a few female friends.</p>
<p>I also sent ''Halloween In A Box'' and other ''Holidays in a box'' - was fun - and roomies and pals seemed to enjoy them :D Very social boxes - good ice-breakers LOL</p>
<p>JeepMOM: 'birthday in a box' - love the idea! I'll save it for the next holiday!</p>
<p>Update on cake: today I was finally able to procure cupcake from campus dining for my D. - yeah! Hopefully it will happen! - however, still no one to receive it for her! She'll have to do it herself.</p>
<p>Back to main issue: please continue sharing your orientation experiences because this is what the thread was meant to share - thanks :)</p>
<p>Parents Orientation at S's school in Aug.
Multicultural orientation (which was open to all freshmen and their parents, not just URMs).</p>
<p>Informal Dinner with freshmen and their mentors (who were students). Informal presentation by students and staff of the diversity programs. Various administrators mingled, introducing themselves to parents by using their first names, something I found refreshing.</p>
<p>One hour session about how to "let go" of your student. This included info about what parents could do to best help students as the students went through college, and it included info about privacy laws. It also included time for Q&As for parents (some asked about things like the college's alcohol policies) and it included time for parents to share their feelings about their kid's leaving home.</p>
<p>One hour walking tour of the area around the campus, highlighting the college's involvement in the community. Only a handful of parents took the tour probably because temps were at least in the high 80s. I found it a nice way to get to get some interesting info from the personable administrator who lead the tour. </p>
<p>Scenic one-hour boat ride.
One-hour presentation about academics (I found this disappointing because what it consisted of was a speaker from the campus' remedial/tutoring center who went over things like services the center offered, and general requirements for graduation. I didn't like the very clear implication that if one was minority, one might need lots of extra help to succeed. And I can read the course catalogue myself!</p>
<p>One-hour presentation about EC activities ranging from volunteering to frats.</p>
<p>Dinner for parents, students, their mentors at a Spanish restaurant. </p>
<p>Regular orientation:
One hour meeting with the prof and 2 student peer counselors of one's student's freshman seminar. (All freshmen take a freshman seminar that's interesting and creatively taught. Those classes have 17 or fewer students). Professor and peer counselors outlined the course and talked about their own backgrounds. Time for Q&As.</p>
<p>Afterward there was a one-hour session in which the college president and other top officials and the head of the parents' group welcomed the freshmen and their parents. The dean of student activities told a funny story about challenges that he'd run into during his college experiences and how those challenges had helped him become the person he is. The challenges included roommate problems and some academic problems.</p>
<p>The welcomes were warm, personal and funny. The president and other administrators lingered afterward to chat with parents.</p>
<p>Next day had various presentations scheduled on things like academics, extracurriculars, careers, and a presumably longer welcome by the college pres. I skipped it because I felt that due to having the other orientation, there wouldn't be much new info for me.</p>
<p>The college did explain privacy regulations including by providing parents with copies of forms that students would have to fill out for the administration to give nonemergency health, disciplinary and academic info to parents. </p>
<p>What stood out to me was the friendliness of the faculty and staff including their obvious personal interest in students. No administrators gave out their cell phone number, which was fine with me. However, they were happy to answer questions and stayed after their sessions as long as parents wished to talk with them. Lots of info was conveyed about peer counselors and RAs and their training, which I found very reassuring. Peer counselors and RAs also were at many of the sessions, and were happy to hang around after and talk to parents. </p>
<p>One 2007 graduate who was in his last week of an on campus job stayed up until 2 a.m. talking with my son, another freshman and me, and gave us his cell phone #, and said he would follow up with S in a couple of weeks.</p>
<p>Ruffle's Mom:</p>
<p>From my experience, your expectations for orientation and for massaging from the college were pretty unreasonable. Hard as it is, I suspect you need to hear the message -- no matter how poorly communicated -- that you should be looking for ways to back off, not reassurance. Granted, you and others like you would probably find it easier to back off if you felt more reassured, and more colleges seem to play it that way than not. But almost every one sends some sort of "back off" message, even if sugarcoated.</p>
<p>For a small college, there is a difference between having a warm, close feeling on campus, and giving parents a checklist of qualities the parents think are warm and close. The former matters a lot more than the latter. Why don't you give it until Thanksgiving and ask your daughter what she thinks?</p>
<p>[Also -- note that the drug-and-alchohol "exception" probably covers 95% of the situations where parents would want to be called. And I've never heard of a real-world situation where a kid was hospitalized and no one called the parents.]</p>
<p>I would have felt very put off by the kind of orientation the OP experienced. My son's small LAC offered up an incredibly warm orientation. While they were clear that they saw our kids as adults, they also welcomed us as part of the family. Each one of the speakers (who were moving, inspiring and reassuring) invited us to call them directly with concerns. This included the college president. They sent us a form during the summer for our son to sign so that medical info could be shared with them and us and made it clear that they wanted to send someone with our son if he ever had to go to hospital and this form would allow them to do that.</p>
<p>I left that orientation feeling that my son had chosen a wonderful school and that the tuition money would be well spent.</p>
<p>AND they sent info about a local church that makes and delivers birthday cakes. Soozie, I'm intrigued that your intricate cakes arrive intact--let's chat about how you package them--but I decided to use this service. </p>
<p>I can't imagine why a college would choose to be so cold and insulting to parents.</p>
<p>
[quote]
moving, inspiring and reassuring
[/quote]
This is what all orientation speakers should aspire to.</p>
<p>I'm not a baker. My kids would probably faint if a home baked cake arrived in the mail. But this is not about the cake. It's about the condescending attitude & downright rudeness that Ruffle experienced. You get more flies with honey, right? If the limitations on parental involvement are wrapped in a nice speech about the benefits the students will get from increased independence, parents will go home with a warm, fuzzy feeling.</p>
<p>Exactly, StickerShock! That's just what they did and I left feeling that they cared deeply about my son's academic success and social well-being, but would also give him the respect and independence he needs to grow.</p>
<p>I agree with the above. I didn't need warm and fuzzy, but I also didn't need "back off" before I'd had a chance to show I warranted it. My S's school did neither--it's approach was more business-like, which was fine for me.</p>
<p>JHS, I think your comment about "people like you" to the OP was unwarranted. When all parents are assumed guilty from the start, an unnecessarily adversarial relationship is created. I would have left that presentation insulted and resentful--hardly a way to create advocates for a school.</p>
<p>I apologize for the "people like you" -- garland is right that that could come across far more harshly than I meant it. I meant it as "people who expect a high degree of involvement" not "horrible, controlling helicopter smothers". I know, and love, a lot of people like you.</p>
<p>That said, I was struck by the OPs unrealistic expectations. While lots of colleges do cater to parents, lots don't, and at the upper end of the prestige scale the latter is much more common. The issue of the birthday cake delivery is emblematic. Small LACs are usually in small towns, and have small staffs. Given their student populations and ages, and academic calendars, in any given year they may have 1-4 kids with birthdays on Labor Day who are in residence then. The question of having a cake delivered will come up 2-3 times per decade. It is no one's job to be a concierge for cake deliveries on legal holidays. In some places in America, you can't get a birthday cake delivered on Labor Day. It isn't a bad reflection on the college that it doesn't do much to deal with that.</p>
<p>"While lots of colleges do cater to parents, lots don't, and at the upper end of the prestige scale the latter is much more common. "</p>
<p>Yes, this is important to know. The more competitive the college is, the more independent they expect their students to be, the more they factor independence in the admissions process, and the more independently their students want to be treated. The lower the tier, in general, the more nuturing the college has to be and needs to be. This is true in part because a smaller percentage of the student body has gone to residential prep schools or taken on responsibilities such as foreign travel, being responsible for national organizations, etc. than is likely to be the case at a top LAC, The degree of hand holding and oversight students get is not related to the amount of $ one pays, but is far more related to the level of competitiveness of the college.</p>
<p>My S is at a tier 2 LAC, so the orientation that I described should be taken in that context.</p>
<p>Well, I guess we know where Vanderbilt stands on the prestige scale at CC now.</p>
<p>Ruffle'smom, over the summer prior to freshman year, the president of D's college mailed all freshman parents a copy of the book "Letting Go" together with a cover letter bearing her signature stopping just short of REQUIRING us to read it prior to students arriving on campus in the fall. I didn't want to read it, but reasoned that if the college president thought it was important, considering that she has like 100 or so earned and honorary degrees (or that's how it seems, anyway), and all this experience governing the institution, well, I would read the stupid book. So I did - hated it - could never imagine my daughter having anything at all in common with the students described in the book - anyway, read every page, then promptly through the thing in the trash, good riddance. </p>
<p>Then, at the parent's breakfast during orientation, the president delivered a very strong "letting go" message. The atmosphere and tone conveyed was very much like what you described in your post. </p>
<p>I can actually understand why she did it, too. I went to several of the parent's meetings, mostly all of the financial themes, and some of the questions coming from other parents were so inappropriate, and embarrassing, and some were outright stupid; some even clearly demonstrated that some parents did not have very good relationships or perhaps close, supportive communications with their sons and daughters (in one of the financial meetings a parent actually asked "how do I make my son pay his work study earnings towards tuition"), and, I got to thinking, considering an incoming class of say 2,500 freshman, if just 10% of the parents call with questions that are inappropriate or outside the scope of what the college should be responsible for answering, that's 250 phone calls coming in at one time during the very busy start of the school year. Add that to all of the legitimate telephone calls from freshman parents and it made sense to me that the president would feel the need as well as have a legitimate operational need to clearly drive home the "letting go" message. </p>
<p>I have never contacted the college for anything, except maybe one or twice the student accounts people when I had some question about finances. Those questions I emailed, as I prefer a written record of financial discussions; no one gets confused later like with telephone calls. I have been summoned/invited to meet with the head coach, once to discuss a scholarship offer and once because they wanted to meet me and they wanted to know if I had any questions, and in those meetings I took a very subordinate, low key position.</p>
<p>I'm actually very grateful for the strong message the college pres sent in the beginning; as a parent who has never been to college, and had no other children to send, I likely would not have known how to continue parenting, or what my role was supposed to be, and obviously to continue to parent as if she were still in high school would have been a bad thing for everyone involved. It was clear to me from some of the questions the other parents had in some of the orientation meetings that they were still parenting from the elementary/junior high perspective and hadn't quite made the transition even yet to high school parenting...</p>
<p>Should a college treat everyone the same way, even if only a very small fraction of the parents call when they shouldn't, or don't understand protocol? It's hard to see what choice they have, really. For staff it just has to be operationally overwhelming, in the beginning of a school year...</p>
<p>I know some of us need the "tough love" approach to remind us that our sons and daughters will now be expected to handle matters for themselves. However, I continue to think that what we must do as parents is remain connected (not as hard these days with E-mail and cell phones) to what is happening in the lives of our offspring. This connection does not extend to solving roommate problems and other issues. I don't fault the parents' orientation programs that remind us of that, but the original poster's example was how not to reassure parents.</p>
<p>My son's college did an excellent job of reassuring me at our segment of orientation and gave me a notion of who might be available should he require it. It was more along the lines of who I might refer him to and not who I should be calling. But it was kindly done. Also, there was a panel with several students and parents who answered questions from the packed audience.</p>
<p>The other day I participated in a conference call for bloggers on the topic of campus mental health and one thing that stuck in my mind was that young people 15-24 are the least likely group to seek help when they need it. Also, according to a psychotherapist in on the call, this is the time when vulnerabilities in personality seem to surface most. </p>
<p>Colleges and universities are going to have to do some reassuring especially in light of findings from the independent commission studying Virginia Tech's response to the trouble on its campus. The mere fact that FERPA is often interpreted incorrectly is not too comforting.</p>
<p>I'd be curious to know the name of this school. OP, are you willing to share?</p>
<p>The only time I ever called one of my kids' colleges was when the web site that is specifically for parent info/updates was not working and I thought they should know about it. So I called. (This is a smaller college than the other 2 kids went to, which didn't even HAVE parent websites!)</p>
<p>northstarmom</p>
<p>You may be correct that a nurturing approach is more common in lower tier schools, however my son is attending a top tier school filled with very high-performing and independent young adults and the orientation felt very welcoming to me. Everyone is different, but for me, being invited to stay in touch reassures me and makes me LESS likely to feel the need to be contacting people at the college. It says to me that they really care about their students and value their parents and that makes me breathe a sigh of relief (he's in a good place) and allows me to step back a bit.</p>
<p>I received this email (edited to protect the innocent) from a friend whose daughter just started at Tufts concerning the presentation they made to kids/parents. </p>
<p>"Well, we took Daughter #3 to Tufts today and had a great time. Tufts does this wonderful matriculation ceremony in the afternoon. It only takes an hour but theres music and some wonderful (and short speeches) by a few people and then President Larry Bacow gave an absolutely fantastic talk. He is smart, funny, warm, a visionary and really lays the foundation for a sense of community at Tufts. Daughter #3 is thrilled to be there.</p>
<p>And while Im certainly not knocking Harvard since both Daughters #1 and #2 love it and are having a great experience, their first day there was nothing like today. I just keep getting more and more evidence of why Tufts is so special. They are lucky to have Larry and I think he was really smart to stay there and not bother with Harvard, which would have been lucky to get him as well."</p>
<p>[Bacow publicly turned down an invitation to be on the short list for President of Harvard last year and chose to stay at Tufts]. </p>
<p>Sounds like a day in which the parents felt reassured and the kids felt validated in their choice to attend Tufts.</p>