Sahai: Cons outweigh the pros for O-Week coordinating

By Neha Sahai     9/16/15 5:30am

Coordinating Orientation Week made me an infinitely better person. I spent the last eight months of my life predominantly thinking of people who weren't me. It frightened me that every decision I made would directly impact about 90 new students I had never met. The gravity of this control was scarily humbling, and as a result, Kush, Monica and I did not at any point hesitate to make whatever sacrifice needed — personal or otherwise. Only after eight months of acting in this mindset did I understand what "It's All About the New Students" actually meant: to put aside your own desires in the genuine interest of somebody else’s well-being. I am incredibly thankful for this experience, and cannot articulate how much I've grown.

However, it's impossible not to be critical of coordinating O-Week in retrospect. Of course, there were many times when I noticed my decisions positively impacting the culture of Will Rice. I can't describe the feeling of watching the new students grow to love Rice and Will Rice, or seeing our incredible advising team face the challenges they did with such good intentions and positive attitudes.

But what is the role of an O-Week coordinator other than a glorified event planner, making decisions we're often barely equipped to make? We must first select an advising team: a group of around 50 students who may not even understand the influence they have over the incoming class. Not even a month into being a coordinator, we must determine who should have such an important role based on a simple paper application and a 15-minute interview. Who are we — a team of 32 students no different from any other undergraduate at Rice — to make these assumptions and evaluations of our peers? We are taught to avoid boxing incoming new students into a personality type based on their forms, yet here we are, doing the same to our advisors. We select a team representing a "cross section of our college's population," meaning we often deny students who would have been fantastic advisors, simply because they don't represent the certain "type" of advisor the team needs.

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Another aspect we struggled with throughout the summer was the role of the administration. Time and time again, I realized my role as a coordinator wasn't necessarily to be a voice for the existing student population, but to take decisions made by the Rice administration (such as removing Cheer Battle and anti-cheers from O-Week) and present them as our own. I couldn’t be a spokesperson for my fellow students; rather, I felt like a face and a voice for the administration. The top-down changes made without our input trivialized the work and thought we put into how we wanted O-Week to influence our colleges and their cultures.

Coordinating is a thankless job that will interfere with your academics, sleep cycle and social life. The enormous amount of time this position requires — a semester and a summer of reading hundreds of forms, sitting in hours of meetings and trainings and performing countless administrative tasks — for a one-credit hour class on your transcript is not for everybody. While Rice tries to compensate for your work through free summer housing and five meals a week, I truly hope coordinating O-Week will become a paid position.

I chose to share my opinion of coordinating simply because many students do not see this side of it. I am aware that not all coordinators had this experience, either; perhaps I was the one who entered with unrealistic expectations. But I wanted to provide all the prospective O-Week coordinators of 2016 with my honest opinion in the hope that you understand some of the challenges you may face.

Would I have coordinated O-Week, knowing all this beforehand? Probably not. That being said, we had an incredible support system. Our masters and college coordinator were always with us, helping us make choices we didn't even know how to start making. Chris Landry, assistant director of First Year Programs, and Sneha Kohirkar, the 2015 O-Week student director, worked harder than our entire coordinating team and dealt with the brunt of our frustrations, which I am infinitely grateful for. And in the end, was it worth the incredible effort and the chance to impact new students’ lives? A million times, yes.

Neha Sahai is a Will Rice College junior. She was a 2015 O-week coordinator.

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