Although I got two weeks behind my posting, the fifth session is still fresh on my mind as I have taken notes of the things that happened. The two casts Social Justice created came in handy because my counterpart called into Fishbowl sick and asked me to take over. Before someone’s monologue, a random orientee stood up and gave his own monologue about how none of the identities applied toward him, how the program should be optional, and asked whether he can go home. Nearly everybody (including myself) were not savvy to having our parade rained on like this — we thought it was extremely disrespectful. Nevertheless, it sparked up some interesting discussion. In my session, someone said that if one has the right to speech, he/she has the right to not exercise that right. The next day, the supervisors held an emergency staff meeting to say that the orientee has been dealt with accordingly and reframed the situation: People like these are the people who need it most.
As I may have mentioned earlier, we orientation advisors help the first-year students choose their first semester’s classes. This process is known as pre-advising because they will see a real advisor later. During this, College of Liberal Arts pre-advisors are asked to take a tally of how many students want to transfer into another college. In a turn of events, I had two orientees wishing to transfer: one to business and another to psychology.
On Friday night, the supervisors put on a banquet to show their appreciation for the work we did and to recognize some outstanding orientation advisors. One nomination read something like, “This person eats, lives, breathes, sleeps orientation.” In my mind, I thought, “That ain’t me — I sleep between my duties;” but to my surprise, that person was me. Gee… I wish I could stay awake for even longer periods of time with as little caffeine as possible.
