A year and a half ago, I was one of the many freshman sitting in FYE class with 15 strangers learning how to transition into college.
I can still remember those 50 minute sessions spent reading aloud from the FYE handbook about the Jesuit tradition, diversity and the dangers of drinking jungle juice.
As someone who has gone through both the participant and the facilitator roles of FYE, I find this new program to be extremely ineffective.
Still, I did benefit from FYE. I learned about signing up for classes and meeting with my advisor.
I discovered interesting activities and groups around campus and found out how I could get involved.
Most importantly, I met new people and I had two upperclassmen to go to when I had questions that only an upperclassman could answer.
At the end of the year, my friend and I decided to apply to be FYE facilitators.
We, along with a faculty resource facilitator, spent an hour every week this past fall talking to a group of freshmen about everything they needed to know as students at Fairfield.
The program had its problems, of course, from freshman not attending their required events to the repetitive and often tedious topics in the “Red Book.”
In order to rectify some of these issues and find a better format for FYE, a committee made up of prominent faculty and staff and two students was formed. After much that time and effort, the Office of Residence Life decided to go an entirely new direction with FYE.
Upperclassmen wanting to work with freshmen will now be First Year Mentors, focusing on a single wing in a freshman building and working in conjunction with the wing’s RA to plan floor programs and meet individually with students.
The vast majority of students do not want another authority figure pestering them into coming to mandatory events to discuss diversity and the Jesuit values. What they really want is a student mentor, someone they can go to who can answer the questions that are important for them. This means everything from suggestions of favorite professors to what life is really like in the townhouses to how to be creative in Barone as well as how to live on a college budget in an expensive town like Fairfield.
The new program undercuts the social aspect of FYE, limiting the FYM’s group to a single gender group of students who already know each other from brushing their teeth together every night in the hall bathroom. Further, the Fairfield Web site indicates that new FYMs will receive only $200 for work beginning at orientation and ending with the academic year.
Essentially, they will become a secondary RA for roughly 2 percent of an RA’s pay. When the administration asked the committee to review the FYE program, it initially asked for student feedback.
This was a step in the right direction; who better to know what students need than the students?
Emily Dragone ’09, one of the students involved in the committee, said that during meetings she voiced her concerns about how focusing too much on the residence halls would limit the program although she agreed that the dorms were the best place to target freshmen.
“I think that there needs to be an equal student to staff ratio so that the conversations can prove to be more of an equal discussion rather than a formality,” she said of committees overall.
The fact that only two students were included in the committee process seems to indicate that Residence Life prefers that freshmen learn about topics that endorse the school’s mission statement rather than topics that truly ease their transition into college.
In that case, why not simply add a course to the core requirement called “What Res Life Wants You to Know 101”?
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