As the school year begins, thousands of freshmen in matching maroon shirts have filled campus for Welcome Week. With a massive campus and over 50,000 students, the University of Minnesota can be a confusing place, and Welcome Week offers resources and information on how to handle the area.
The University can be overwhelming to freshmen at first. New students need to figure out where their classes are, what textbooks they need, financial aid, how to use the campus shuttles and face many other obstacles as well. Welcome Week helps make the University a more familiar place.
While wearing matching T-shirts and following your Welcome Week leader may put a damper on the new independent college life, it helps in the end. Welcome Week is a time to get to know campus and meet new people who live next door in the dorms. It provides a venue for students to form their first friendships at the University, friendships that can last a very long time.
While much of the information is crucial to living at the University, some of it students can do without. The long lectures in huge auditoriums and talks about graduating in four years are unnecessary. The University emphasizes four-year graduation because it counts for a variety of national rankings, but Welcome Week should be focused on students, not statistics.
The smaller meetings with information about classes and campus have helped students get used to the University. Getting to know advisers, the dorms and the people around campus are the most helpful aspects of the week-long orientation.
Despite the eye-rolling, Welcome Week at its best can help make a new, strange place feel like home.