Orientation

Colleges and Universities A-Z Swarthmore College
1

<p>I was asked what parents should expect during orientation:</p>

<p>Move in starts early in the morning -- I can't remember if it's 8 or 9 am.</p>

<p>The ideal thing is to arrive in Phila the night before. If you feel like it, you can go check out your room when you arrive. The dorm RAs will already be in the dorm and can let you into your room to look around.</p>

<p>Then, show up at your dorm first thing the next morning. There will be orientation advisors (CAs) hanging around to help unload. My advice: pull your car up to the dorm, unload the whole car out into a pile on the sidewalk. Then, go park the car to get it out of the way. Parking and spaces in front of the dorms are scarce.</p>

<p>Then, carry the stuff up to your room. If parents are lucky, the CAs will do most of the carrying!</p>

<p>After getting the stuff up to the room and meeting roommates, students go off to get their ID cards, room keys, etc.</p>

<p>There is a parents tour in the late morning (maybe 10:30, I can't remember). This tour goes around to all of the support offices: dean offices, health center, mental health counseling, security, etc. At each stop, there's a little Q&A. This tour is worth going on, IMO. It gave my wife and I a good feeling about the people at Swarthmore and a sense of how they view students.</p>

<p>Then, there is lunch in Sharples. Most parents meet up with their kids and eat lunch together: perhaps with roommate's parents, too.</p>

<p>After lunch, parents go to Lang Performing Arts Center for two info sessions. One is a Q&A with a panel of four or five Swarthmore seniors. Very good session: both practical advice and a good sense of "Swatties".</p>

<p>The second session is welcoming words and a Q&A with President Bloom, Dean Gross, and the Provost. Really good session. Dean Gross is hilarious.</p>

<p>During these two parent sessions, the incoming students are in another auditorium with their own two welcoming sessions.</p>

<p>After these sessions, everyone gathers in the lobby of the Lang Center for coffee, pastries, and general milling around while saying their good byes. At the end of this, the students take off for the dorm and their small group orientation session with their CA group. This reception breaks up sometime around 5 or 5:30 if I recall. </p>

<p>Parents can wander around campus or leave -- probably for a quiet dinner full of mixed emotions (excitement for their offspring, a little sadness, etc.) or a drive home. I recommend walking around campus and seeing some of the gardens and other sites: the ampitheater, the Scott Arboreteum, the sushi bar lounge in the Science Center, the coffee shop in Kohlberg, the courtyard in front of Trotter, etc. Just a general tour of campus to get a visual idea of where everything is. The place is really gorgeous in late summer.</p>

<p>There is very convenient shopping (Target, Best Buy, mall) if you need to do any last minute shopping. We all went to Target after dinner the night we arrived and bought the last-minute stuff. Others do shopping the night after move-in and then drop stuff off at the dorm.</p>

2

<p>Thanks as always for the thorough rundown, interesteddad. DS will be attending the Tri Co Institute thing, so we plan to send him down with the bare minimum and then meet him on the 23rd with the bulk. Sounds like Swarthmore has things nicely planned--nicely planned to shove us out the door. Which is a good thing. This is very, very strange--I keep telling myself it's like sending him to camp but myself knows I'm lying.</p>

3

<p>Yeah. My sense was that short good-byes are probably for the best. Everybody's kind of teetering on the edge to begin with.</p>

<p>My father always talked about how he felt when he drove away from my dorm and waved freshman year. It is one of those moments that sears itself into your parental memory.</p>

<p>The message that parents get throughout the day from the college is that these are young adults and they are perfectly capable of figuring things out for themselves. It's a pervasive attitude of the school...and pretty comforting.</p>

4

<p>Thanks, that is definitely helpful. I did a Linens and Things/Bed Bath & Beyond run today to get some necessary stuff, but I plan on heading down to Swat (8 hrs from home... a good distance away) the day before and buying some of the bigger stuff then. Just judging from Ride the Tide, Swat knows how to run an info session and separate parents from students. Should be exciting...</p>

5

<p>Staceysmom [I've been wondering for months if you named yourself after the song], my daughter will also be attending the Tri College program. However, she'll be coming back home for about a day and a half before the regular orientation begins.</p>

6

<p>searchingavalon--I did indeed take my screen name from the song; I have no child named Stacey and I do not in fact "got it going on." Anyway, my son will also be coming home for the weekend after Tri-Co, which we're looking at as a sort of trial separation in preparation for the real thing. We're planning to arrive in time for the Parent Tour; since DS will be somewhat familiar with the campus the general plan is to stay out of his way as much as possible.</p>

7

<p>It is hard to do, but as mothers, if you guys are cheery, then I think the kids get the message and the separation is better. I was cheery all day until the time to leave....my son looked unsure of himself. I moped about it at home for a week (about the look on his face) but it all worked out.</p>

<p>Also, you guys should hope for cooler weather. In my opinion, cooler weather makes it less emotional - don't ask me to explain why..</p>

8

<p>Coming from the west coast we combined orientation with a family vacation since only my son and I (from our family, that is) had ever visited campus. There was no way mother and kid sister (despite how she rolls) were going to be able to handle the separation without at least being able to visualize their son/brother’s new “home”. We spent about 5 days in and around Philadelphia prior to the handoff (amortizing the airfare), taking in downtown, the riverfront, historical districts and the ville. On D-Day sister got to help put up posters, meet "hot" roommate and get mistaken (3 years prematurely) for an orientee. Final separation was still very difficult…tough guy dad could only nod, but not speak, at the end. And I would compare our first dinner as a threesome to a funeral, but I would risk inferring that it was significantly more fun than it actually was. Nonetheless, this approach definitely beat the available alternatives. Finances permitting, I strongly recommend that a student's entire immediate family visit Swat prior to, during, or as soon after orientation as possible.</p>

9

<p>Well, we're preparing for the big move at our house. Our living room is filled with the effluvia that is dorm life - TV, mattress pad, linens, lights, etc., etc. It will be sad to see son go, but he's been chomping at the bit since, oh, April. We're glad for him.</p>

<p>We plan to arrive (son, mom, me) a day early (staying in Chester, close by), see Philly, shop for things that don't make sense to shop for early. I see from a post up above that RAs are in the dorms the day before move-in. Can we check out the room? It's in Willetts. Are the outside doors locked, or can we just go in? If they are locked, how do we gain access? Mom wants to make sure no boogie men are populating the room, etc. etc - mom stuff! We also figure it will be easier to tour on a less crowded day. Mom is disabled so it will be tough to get around a walking campus with lots of people around.</p>

<p>Is there an IKEA in the Philly area? Nothing of the sort in the Maine boonies where we live, and son wants an IKEA bookshelf, well, just because.</p>

10

<p>Hi Bman,
My S, the soon to be junior, lived in Willets his freshman year. He said that getting into the dorm a day early will probably be a matter of luck. The exterior doors do stay locked, so it will just be a matter of whether someone is around to open a door, or if someone has propped a door open temporarily. As to getting in to see the room, he said that the RA's have master keys, so if you can find an RA and it's a particularly nice RA, he/she would probably let you in, although they are not "supposed" to do that. Keys would normally be available on the first day of orientation. As to the IKEA bookshelf, S says to tell you that there are bookshelves in the rooms, one per customer. He is not sure that there would be extra room for another bookshelf. His bottom line was, "Tell them to forget about the IKEA bookshelf."</p>

11

<p>There is an IKEA in Phila, but I don't think it is anywhere remotely close to Swarthmore. Definitely check the room first before buying (or bringing) additional furniture like a bookshelf.</p>

<p>To get into a dorm the day before, you'll just have to go up to the door and hope the RAs are hanging around downstairs. Most likely, they will be just before or just after dinner as there isn't much else for them to be doing.</p>

<p>The door was propped open last last year, so we just walked up to D's room. I think along the way, D met an RA and introduced herself. The RA offered to unlock the door for a quick peek.</p>

12

<p>My son was at Wharton last year (as a freshman). The bookshelf was a bookcase, about 4 feet high with about 4 shelves, plenty for him. There were 2 of them, one for each occupant.</p>

13

<p>There is an IKEA on the southside of Philly (check location at IKEA.com) that had its grand opening at this time last year when our D was starting Swat as a freshman. My plan was to go and load up but we got everything else we needed at Target on the Baltimore Pike just 15 minutes from campus. D was clear that she didn't want me to return after we left, so I mailed the IKEA curtains a week later!</p>