Alem: O-Week student-run, not student-led

By Anita Alem     9/16/15 5:19am

If you had asked me seven months ago what my favorite aspect of Rice was, I would have undoubtedly responded “anything that can be student-led, will be student-led.” As an Orientation Week coordinator who has experienced what is one of the most stressful weeks for 32 students, I have to reconsider my response. I do not take issue with the value of student leadership, but the reality of the ideal of “student-led,” especially when it comes to O-Week.

To parents and new students, O-Week coordinators are the face of Rice. They are the first point of contact, and effectively, the first point of blame, for any issues that may arise. Coordinators across colleges dealt with the fallout from overcrowding, ranging from angry parent emails to last-minute separations of carefully crafted rooms and suites to accommodate students shuffled around days before O-Week began. Ultimately, we faced the consequences and stress for decisions entirely orchestrated within Dean Hutchinson’s office. We did not have a single meeting with Dean Hutch to discuss how to best address the issue of overcrowding for our individual college room schemes. If something is to be truly student-led, students must participate in all decisions, whether through representation of former coordinators in the decision-making process or current coordinators working with administration to create solutions when problems arise.

When decisions about O-Week are made solely by administration, coordinators become little more than mouthpieces for the administration to their advising teams. The removal of Cheer Battle was a major change further restricting our control over O-Week. Coordinators had the freedom only to decide how much trouble they wanted to be in with administration and even with other colleges, depending on whether and how they taught cheers and anti-cheers. Through the seven-month planning period, we met twice to discuss this removal; one meeting featured an unproductive conversation about our emotions on an already cemented change, the other informed us we had to pretend we wholly supported the removal of Cheer Battle and to attempt to manage our advising teams’ response no matter what. It was clear from the beginning: Coordinators have the responsibility of carrying out and normalizing administrative wishes with incredibly limited input in changing most campus-wide events.

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It is difficult to make changes when you’re unsure what is wrong. Rice has the event and survey routine down to a science — except when it comes to publicizing the data and getting feedback from all parties. New students are surveyed annually at the end of the week, and advisors are surveyed throughout their service for feedback on improving training. Coordinators must be surveyed regularly, including post-training, regarding interview processes such as optimizing the co-advisor applications, and immediately following O-Week to provide a platform not only for improvement but reflection. Coordinators have not yet been formally surveyed even once about our training or experience, although there are plans for gathering feedback within the next few weeks. For the surveys conducted among other groups, we received none of the results for feedback — not from the previous years and certainly not from our own O-Week. We could only access what survey data administration chose to pass on, which was that students were uncomfortable with Cheer Battle and uncomfortable with messy late-night events. The latter fact was used to encourage removal of those events across all colleges, although we had no specific information on what aspects of the event or even which residential colleges’ events were at fault. To truly improve new students’ O-Week experiences, coordinators themselves must be surveyed throughout service and have access to previous survey results from new students, advisors and past coordinators when creating the O-Week programming for the coming year.

Like most service positions in residential colleges, O-Week coordinators are unpaid and underappreciated. However, unlike most positions, O-Week coordinators must sacrifice an entire summer of their lives and devote themselves to the future collegiate success of complete strangers for seven months. Moreover, while many other positions of leadership have a built-in network of subordinates, such as with a college president and executive council, Coordinators collaborate on a level team without qualified individuals to delegate work to if they are overwhelmed. Without question, coordinating negatively impacts our academic performance. Although monetary compensation would be ideal, considering entire companies for creating orientations exist, at the very least we should be guaranteed both summer meals and housing, not just housing. The one credit hour we receive for our LEAD course is not compensation: It was not for a letter grade, it did not count as distribution, and it added more work to coordinators. We had to schedule our responsibilities, including about 30 hours of interviews along with mingling events around a three-hour afternoon class on most Sundays in the spring semester. If anything, we should receive a letter grade for the course and have the class meet for only half the semester so as not to interfere with times of stress in the coordinating calendar.

Would I go back and do it again? A thousand times yes — nothing could replace the surge of pure love I feel every time I see a new Martelian just walking to class, merely existing as a Rice student. But perhaps this time I would warn myself not to be so hopeful about the changes I could make, because until administration and students truly approach O-Week from a level field of understanding and collaboration, it will always be student-run but not quite student-led.

Anita Alem is a Martel College junior and a Thresher News Editor. She was a 2015 O-week coordinator.

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