It is already starting to be fall and, for many, that means planning for the beginning of the school year and preparing for the new arrivals. By this time, we have made sure we have the appropriate faculty in place to teach all of the courses being offered, we have probably reviewed and updated the content of all of our courses, and we had our (probably brief) summer vacation or at least long weekend. What is also being planned but often gets short notice is New Student Orientation. The ritual that all of our member programs participate in to varying degrees has been part of academics for decades and perhaps centuries. I suspect the historians among us can trace this back to the middle ages and demonstrate that it relates to some type of “rite of passage.”
Despite orientation being pervasive, there is little homogeneity in its application. Naturally, it will be different between first year students entering a graduate program and rising juniors who have declared a major and formally entered the last two years of their Bachelor’s Program. It is interesting to discover, however, that as you look around the country, programs and universities have entirely different philosophies and perspectives on this ritual even in comparisons among graduate programs or among Bachelor’s programs. As a result, the length of time for orientation, complexity of the activities, and involvement by faculty/staff also vary. In addition, the cost of hosting these events in terms of time and out-of-pocket expenses also varies widely. While I don’t want to reveal trade secrets, you can google new student orientation and then the name of the program and get an idea of the variety of activities pursued. Some are pretty tame but there are examples of overnight camping trips, fishing, and many other extensive events.
If one considers the purpose of New Student Orientation, you generally come across a pretty standard set of goals or learning objectives. Generally, the stated goals include:
- Gaining an understanding of student support services and the Student Affairs office (or equivalent)
- Introduce students to academic and professional advising
- Implement registration into a class schedule for the first term
- Introduce financial aid, scholarship and other similar opportunities
- Formally introduce primary faculty in the program and key staff that will support their academic experience.
Health Administration Programs generally include a set of learning objectives that differentiate us and our graduates from others being prepared for healthcare leadership. What is quite different among member programs is a greater emphasis on the preparing our students to function effectively within the culture of healthcare. This emphasis contributes to superior outcomes for our students. For many programs, the preparation for culture starts during orientation, before the student enters a classroom or logs in online for the first time. We understand and value efforts to prepare our students to perform successfully in a professional environment. They need to develop academic competencies as well as those seen among the organizations that hire our students.
What are some of those competencies and how do we go about introducing them during New Student Orientation? There are probably many and I would love to hear ideas from you all. I have identified three primary areas that I see programs emphasize: Value of Cohorts, Value of Collaboration, and Appreciation of Diversity.
- With respect to cohorts, during orientation there is often a series of activities that help the students begin to identify with one another as members of a team. Many will be anxious as they begin this portion of their life. They can begin to build trust in their classmates by getting to know them and start to think as a group and not just the individual. For many, you can provide the first opportunity for them to participate as part of a team to meet some non-sports goal. They will lean that they are all facing this new challenge and will begin to bond as a unit. If you have the opportunity to take students off campus or even have extended time with them on campus, this can be started with nonthreatening and “fun” participatory activities. I have seen physical scavenger hunts, group engineering construction projects, relay races, or even competitive word games used to start the process. If students are remote and not connected in time or space, this can be more of a challenge but there are activities done online that serve the same purpose of building trust and knowledge of each other. Constrained by your environment, New Student Orientation provides a great opportunity to meet the hard objectives mentioned above and the softer objective of introducing a cohort. When they enter the workforce, they will be a part of a cohort thus it is vital that they learn how to bring these folks together for their common purpose.
- With respect to collaboration, New Student Orientation and some of the activities mentioned above can begin to illustrate collaboration benefits. These students do not generally know one another at the start of orientation thus making effective collaboration challenging. If they form teams within the broader cohort, they can see how effective collaboration can work to the benefit of the group. They will also see how it fails without effective communication among members. In fact, the failures and frustrations of collaboration efforts in an environment that does not matter to the students offer a great lesson. As we go forward in the formal classroom or online efforts, the collaboration competency gets regularly reintroduced. The lessons begun during orientation can facilitate stronger collaboration successes during your program and during their professional careers. Delivering high quality, efficient and effective healthcare services is a very complex undertaking. Those we train must understand how to collaborate effectively across the broad array of healthcare professionals to be successful. These early experiences will not assure ultimate collaborative success, but a fun collaborative exercise can go a long way toward your achieving your program goals.
- Finally, appreciation of diversity can begin during New Student Orientation. In this instance, diversity has a large number of dimensions. The students in your cohort may very well differ by gender, race, age, work experience, and socioeconomic background. For most programs, students enter with other, equally diverse backgrounds. You may get students with business, nursing, biology, and history in your program. There may also be marked political differences as well. All of this will become evident as the students introduce and define themselves. Adjusting to these differences may also be somewhat new to students depending upon their backgrounds. Your graduates will be asked to work in a delivery setting defined by these and perhaps more diversity. Leaning to communicate with, respect, trust and collaborate with people different from themselves will certainly be vital to their future successes.
The opportunity to put these differences together when you conduct New Student Orientation can be highly beneficial for your students. It is also an element that sets our graduates apart from those they will be competing with during their careers. Other skills matter as well but learning to define themselves as a part of a cohort and work for the success of the cohort, effectively collaborate with clinical and other administrators in their organization and effectively utilizing the value of the diverse labor force they will be collaborating with should serve them all well. We are all good at producing students with these and other skills and the upcoming New Student Orientation is a great opportunity to start that process. If this discussion was too elementary, add your thoughts. If this was foreign to you, contact some of your friends in other organizations to find out what they are doing.