For some reason, I did not start this session in the most desirable of conditions.  The coughs, sneezes, sniffles, and sore throat plagued me throughout the week.  Nevertheless, I put on the best show I could as if nothing happened.  Besides the added responsibility of a commuter wing and missing a 7:30 AM meeting on Day 2, I continued to perform and have a blast in the process.   Indeed, it seems like only one person voiced his/her concern about me being sick.  This week was unique in that I had even more one-on-one time with students and discovered just how well I could present information to a large group simply by “keeping it real,” according to an orientee.

During preadvising, I had a student who not only had a medical bar, but wanted to switch to Mechanical Engineering.  It is unfortunate to see that he was barred from registration for four weeks when UHS gets his test results, and I sympathized with him when he talked about how inefficient the bureaucracy is here in America.  I agreed with him, and ensured him that I find UT more efficient with respect to paperwork since so many things can be done using UT Direct.  During the last day, I managed to come across him again, and he brought the good news that he is able to get the doctors to fax the results.  I reminded him to check back every day and register as quickly as possible.

You may recall from my second session that I had a residential wing of five students.  A commuter wing consists of groups of students who will not be living in Jester East with us during orientation.  Although it is obvious that keeping people orderly gets more difficult as the group size increases, my partner and I put on a great show.  When we talked about campus issues, I was surprised by how open the students were about a topic as sensitive as sexual assault/relationship violence — they shared experiences about working with survivors, and bounced ideas off each other.  Our feedback forms included things such as:

• They made me confident that college upper classmen weren’t all jerks.
• Sunny was hilarious and *** was great!  {Heart} them both!
• Both had a very warm and caring presence.  I could talk to them about anything.
• I like the laptop
• They gave us the warmest welcome possible and made us feel as though we were already UT students.

The next sessions are going to test our wits as classes continue to fill up and students begin to lose their composure.  I will be heading to South Padre tomorrow with half the staff (excluding supervisors!) for a break.

It has been a little bit more than one month since we orientation advisors moved in to Jester. It is unbelievable that we are already halfway through orientation. Lacking a wing and interesting situations in peer advising, you would think that the week was uneventful; but in reality, there is nothing that can rain on any session of orientation! For the students, I endured bad weather situations and took one to a math test and another to a dorm all he way across the weather. They were very thankful for my navigational skills.

No drama happened until I showed up to my shift for registration (one of my favorite duties, by the way). There was an education major who was unable to register for any of her classes because they were closed. Being someone qualified to only advise for engineering, the best thing I can do was to get the appropriate advisors and the registrar. In the staff meeting, Fishbowl delivers a “Got Krunk” award to an outstanding orientation advisor. Little did I know that I would receive this award.  It is true that we all strive for attention and accolades, but I will continue to do my best for myself and for incoming students.

Over the past couple years, innovative services such as P2P, VoIP, and Internet TV made the Internet so much more useful. A clear sign that telecom providers are unable or unwilling to carry these services is the net neutrality debate. It is a given that these companies would sell consumers more speed than what they could provide on the basis that the nightmare scenario that everybody uses said maximum speed simultaneously is highly unlikely. It is also a given that many companies are out for profit, and that has been one of the major barriers to innovation in our capitalistic world today. Taking a page from the University of Texas at Austin ITS playbook, I would like to suggest a middle ground where competitors can somehow play fair.

My proposed solution revolves about one question: Would you rather be limited by speed or the actual amount of data transferred? Like many of my friends, I would rather be limited by the latter. Therefore, I would like to propose Internet service plans in which the speed remains constant, but the quota is tiered. Once a user exceeds this quota, they are reverted to slower speeds (in my University’s case, it is dial-up speeds, but that’s adjustable) or given the option to buy more data transfer allocation. I believe that this would be mutually beneficial to innovators and service providers alike because:

• It is an objective method to penalize those who use “disproportionate amounts of resources”
• It opens streams of revenue in the form of customers purchasing extra data transfer allocations when they must have the speed.
• It has the potential to raise awareness of additional services the ISP provides (e.g. Use ___ with our service and it will not count against your transfer allocation).

While I salute those who carry this country forward in technological advances, this is where I am willing to meet those with an obligation to please their stockholders.

Learning from what we did during our previous session, we orientation advisors set out this week to make an even better experience than before for an even larger group. Even with this group, I received only five students instead of the usual 20. Five was enough to add color to this week’s experience in all the required programs. By hosting a wing, I also needed to lead a discussion about social justice and campus issues. During the first discussion, they remained silent because they were outnumbered 4:1 by women. I fixed that by talking about my experiences during these discussions and reiterating that they are safe spaces for everybody to make themselves heard. That appeared to work, as indicated by their voices during the campus issues discussion.

Pre-advising (I prefer to call it peer advising) brought another group of students with diverse needs, some of which tested my ability to think on my feet: One came in with so many credits from placement tests and dual credits that I had to use a calculator to figure out how many hours he has in total and I had to run a degree audit on two of them to find some missing information. As the day wrapped up, I was impressed that I was able to get people in and out quicker or have time to show them the ins and outs of registration. That night, I participated in “lobby advising” again. This is for students to seek further clarification and for us to give them some tricks of the trade. Our highlight of the week was:

A student showed some clear signs of frustration with coming up with her schedule because she received conflicting information. On one hand, we told her that her AP Calculus BC test was good for only M 408C (so she will need to take M 408D) while her real advisor told her that it was good for both M 408C and M 408D (so she will have to take M 427K). Despite our attempts to help and assure her everything is going to be all right, we had to have two peer advisors working on this: I investigated why she received the wrong information while another one kept working on her schedule. Someone eventually found the advisor’s home number through the UT directory, and she proceeded to call it at 12:30 at night to show her displeasure. It turns out that the real advisor gave her an outdated handout, but I was not quick enough to stop her from getting revenge.

All in all, I am proud of my wing for being such a respectful group, I hope that everything works out well for that woman I mentioned earlier, and I am proud of being part of one of the best orientation programs in the nation. I never realized that I can be this good at working with people, and I will definitely continue this for the rest of my job and beyond this job. I received a small talking-to because of my attire. Indeed, I needed new pants because I have only one pair of bottoms is without obvious signs of wear, tear, and abuse After moving to a different room, I went to Old Navy to buy myself two pairs of long kakhis (you really cannot go wrong with those).

Look! I’m Sunny! I wear a bicycle helmet everywhere I ride and a huge grin for my students!

One of my friends works at NASA, and he was talking about how there is so much bureaucracy and paperwork people have to go through in order to get anything done. I proceed to go off on a tangent about my lucky streak with vending machines giving me free candy, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: You know… I’ve been getting free candy from the vending machines recently
Friend: lucky you
Me: Yeah… the vending machines have this thing to prevent your money from getting eaten.
Friend: hmm….that would really be a neat feature at like….all vending machines
Friend: how does it work i wonder?
Me: It’s like the garage door safety sensors
Me: If the beam gets interrupted, the product is dispensed.
Me: It should be obvious where this beam is placed.
Friend: is it an infrared sensor?
Me: I think it is
Friend: aww….too bad it isn’t a laser so someone could use a mirror to defeat it
Me: haha
Friend: there is this vending machine at work where the drinks would fall but they wouldn’t come out once they fell
Me: hmm
Friend: it had this door thing that wouldn’t quite open so the bottle would be stuck behind that door
Friend: someone would have to buy another drink for it to be dislodged
Me: … and both of them would come out?
Friend: yep
Me: At least you don’t get screwed.
Friend: yeah…..i figured out just to get another drink instead and it hasn’t happened since
Me: mmm
Friend: there are some new vending machines that will grab the product from a shelf and then dispense it
Friend: those are fun to watch
Me: Yep
Friend: the candy machines we have at work are just like the ones at my high school that have a spiral metal wire that turns when you select what you want, and sometimes it won’t fall and you get to wrestle with the machine
Me: Yeah… those are the ones we have.
Friend: except in high school there were cameras placed right next to the machines watching your every move
Me: But we have the IR sensor.
Friend: you’d think at NASA we would use something a little bit more advanced
Me: hehe
Friend: like something that prints you a receipt everytime you use the machine
Me: Why would you want that?
Friend: i was being sarcastic
Friend: it would fit right in with the amount of paper we already use

According to the supervisors, this session is like a dress rehearsal because there are fewer people in this session and most students have already started. Because of that, most wings did not live in Jester East. Although I was slightly bummed that I did not get to do parking or get my own wing, I had a great time nonetheless.

The fun began on Wednesday when a coworker got locked inside his restroom. Although it seems ridiculous that this would happen, it is entirely possible because he lives in a room with connecting bath, and the locks are outside the bathroom. With both sides locked, he was stuck for one hour. The emergency maintenance workers came and revealed to the group that the door to his room was unlocked, so any of us could have gone in and rescued him… oops! In any case, here is a picture of him as he was rescued:

As an orientation advisor, I get to help students choose their first classes. Everybody I pre-advised trusted my advice, and I gave them a few “tricks of the trade” to take home with them. The only special case I came across was a summer first-year student who is taking some classes in the summer and received credit for most of the first-year courses. I had no choice but to put him in a class recommended for a second-year student with the blessing of a general engineering class associated with it. I hope he does well; and if he doesn’t, he can hunt me down and shake his fist at me as I pass by him.

On the night before registration, we had fun with “Ducks on a Bus,” a comedy show, and “Club Jester,” an unofficial party the orientation advisors put on as an alternative to drinking parties (we do our best to keep these first-year students out of trouble ). Although our first shows are serious in nature, that committee reserves the right to make fun of them. For example, the show has a monologue for a World of Warcraft player based on a Social Justice monologue:

Here. Me. Game.

On Friday, we celebrated the departure of Boys’ State. Although they had nothing to do with the orientation program, they resided in Jester West and presented an annoyance to the staff, especially since they were looking at our women staff and students in disrespectful ways. That is really not surprising because they are not allowed to even talk to women! Tomorrow will bring another 1,200 students as well as parking duties. Please wish us all the best of luck.

Invariably, all the projects I have come across come with the end goal in mind. Sometimes, these goals are quite overwhelming, and it is how I feel about projects at the beginning. Also invariably, the end product meets or exceeds expectations. With workshop nearly over, I saw the many aspects falling into place. What was the secret of success? How is it possible for us orientation advisors to be leaders and followers at the same time? Before I go into that, I would like to show you what we have done.

My committee, OAABBQ (Orientation Advisor Activities and BBQ), is responsible for the day 1 barbecue, the break room (the OAsis), and the trip in the week that we do not have orientation. This room is located in a study lounge, which obviously does not look very thrilling to begin with. Our responsibility is to make it look great! To do so, we worked hours beyond what the supervisors scheduled for “committee work,” often working into 12 or 1 in the morning. As a result of this, we received a slight amount of bashing behind our backs. We were known as the committee that did not work very much and clumped together like no other committee does.

When we revealed the OAsis on Thursday, our work finally paid off. As each committee stepped in, we received looks of amazement, like this one:

Friday consisted of running through all the shows. Despite a few technical problems (such as a cohort’s computer being annoying), everybody was surprisingly patient and the actors were great! Unfortunately, I was only able to get pictures of the Midnight Prowl run-through. This is a picture of their reenactment of the 1961 Panty Raid:

Even as someone who is well-versed in technology, I still think that the technical portions are still the most difficult because errors in the final product cannot be covered up by any human act and hence become more distracting. Without the Multimedia and Publicity committee’s help, we would not have the amazing movie clips we saw on Thursday. As a matter of fact, they were amazing to the point of receiving a well-deserved standing ovation.

In a matter of only three days, practice will be over, and it will be time to reveal our work to the 7,200 incoming students and parents. The uniting forces for this product were teamwork, open sharing of thoughts, and the bonds of friendship. By following each other’s instructions, we became leaders and followers at the same time. I think I have said this once, but I will say it again: I could not be happier taking this job. I feel more confident and capable of working in a group of people.