Their arms are tired from constant handshaking and waving. And when they meet yet another new face, they automatically start listing name, hometown and campus address.
Freshmen may be exhausted, but after seven days designed to get them acclimated to college life, they're ready to jump into Penn's daily grind.
As Tyler Gerstenfeld stood on Hill Field Monday night for the Class of 2005 Picnic, he tried to express his mixed emotions from the past week.
"It's exciting and daunting at the same time," the College freshman said. "I came from a class of 53. There are more people on this field than there were in my whole high school."
For the past seven days, the time of new students has been occupied with a variety of activities, seminars and tours designed to acclimate them to academic and social life at Penn.
The Council of Undergraduate Deans, the principal architects of New Student Orientation, created a week included activities from a comedy night to walking tours of West Philadelphia to a discussion of Voltaire's Candide.
"The purpose of NSO is to introduce students as effectively as possible to the University's core mission, which is education," Deputy Provost Peter Conn said. "Thus, many of the activities are intended to provide students with a wide variety of academic, cultural and civic experiences."
In general, freshmen responded positively to NSO, consistently giving top ratings to Penn Life Sketches, a skit that addresses academic and social issues, such as date rape. However, few first-year students had glowing reviews for the Peer Education Discussion that followed the performance.
"The Life Sketches were really impressive," Wharton freshman Casey Zeman said. "But they could have done without the discussion afterwards. The play was self-explanatory."
Several freshmen cited the academic integrity workshops, which are designed to introduce students to Penn's honor code, as one of the least effective programs of orientation.
"I thought a lot of it was futile," College and Wharton freshman Jantira Supawong said. "What it came out to was there are a lot of gray areas, so if you aren't sure about something, you better check with a professor."
For a solution, College freshman Jen Klatt recommended that the University condense the academic integrity material into a handbook that would serve as a reference throughout a student's college career.
While NSO itself remained very similar to last year's programs, CUPID -- where students traditionally signed up for e-mail, obtained PennCards and researched student activities -- was eliminated. Instead, the University replaced the popular "one-stop shop" with an NSO information fair, and the online service Campus Express allowed students to coordinate services such as e-mail over the summer.
But some freshmen complained that they discovered clubs and organizations -- or free gifts such as the popular PennCard holder -- only after the fair was closed.
"Next year I would keep the fair going for an extra two days," College freshman Galit Heller said. "By the time you found out about things, it was too late."
The Council of Undergraduate Deans will conduct a Web-based survey to evaluate the effectiveness of this year's NSO, and will analyze those results in October when they begin NSO plans for the Class of 2006.
"We tried to infuse diversity into NSO in a more substantial way, but that was largely unsuccessful," said Lindsey Mathews, chairwoman of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. SCUE and Mathews were heavily involved in the recent revamping of NSO.
Last year, the Council extended NSO from four days to a week full of activities to better orient students to Penn. Some, however, found the non-stop schedule tiring.
"Sometimes I wanted more free time than they gave me," College freshman Melissa Aylor said. Many of her classmates agreed, citing the physical strains of going to bed late only to wake up early for another NSO event the following day.
Mathews, a College senior, added that she hopes to develop programming to help freshmen understand that diversity among their peers comes not only in the form of race and ethnicity but also in personality type.
One College freshman sensed the diverse population in his short time on campus.
"Over the past week, I've met people from Ghana, Kenya, Korea, Brazil," Nirav Shelat said. "Walking down Locust Walk is like walking into the [United Nations]."
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