Dis-Orientation: Different Schools (of thought)

While attending a parent orientation at my daughter’s university (four down, one to go,) I tried (really, I tried) to pay attention to the various school-specific celebrities they wheeled out in front of the parents and the students.

For the record, I attended one of the two major state universities in Washington. While this orientation event occurred at one of the two, this was not the university I had attended. 

We were graced with the presence of former students who had gone on to serve on their local town councils, various chambers of commerce, and one former football player.

We were in a crowded room festooned with purple and yellow (the school colors) table cloths, gift bags with sprigs of shiny pompon larvae and current college students who would serve as the guides for our soon-to-be college students.  The groups would divide between students and parents. 

The kids would get a tour and a good, solid pep-talk about why this was the right university for them to attend, as well as the actual feat of registration and feeding.  (Because of the way things were scheduled, this meant they got our leftovers.)

Here’s the rub:  After a quick chat from the Student Body President and one of the Higher-up Chancellor-types, we split up. The kids got to hear a former super-star football player from the university’s 2000 Rose Bowl team.  We got to listen to the Assistant ti the Associate Vice Provost of Admissions Affairs and Subsidiary School Benefits Coordinator. Once she was done we got the Tertiary Financial Aid Adjutant in Charge of Award Circumvention and Ancillary Indebtedness Coordinator.

Admittedly, they did their part to get everyone excited. The former football star got half the room to shout "GO!" while the Assistant to the Co-Recruitment Adjutant Administrator of Viral Videos got the other half to shout a bi-syllabic word I find too difficult to repeat.

The Assistant to the Co-Recruitment Adjutant Administrator of Viral Videos (AssCorAAVV) complained that the football player always had the louder side of the room. He was disheartened because he didn't have the chance to be a football player (bad back... or some such excuse.) I pointed out to him that the former football player also was the guy who had the less-difficult monosyllabic word to get his people to shout.

Also, the AssCoRAAVV also had to deal with the fact that his side of the room was right next to the blueberry scones, and there were many mouths filled with delectable (albeit dry) treats.

After the "GO" / "[obscenity]" rally, we got to hear from various people with words that included "President" and "Vice Provost" in their job titles.

At first, there were all those “Welcome to the university” speeches, and then each individual gave approximately the same core speech with a few variations specific to their departments.

From these individual speeches, I gathered the following information.

Apparently my daughter will:

1.      Learn to solve tomorrow’s problems through preparation at this institution. (Presumably, today’s problems are being solved by yesterday’s students.)

2.      Learn to combine different disciplines to solve tomorrow’s problems. (i.e.: A degree in Anthropology will be combined with a minor in English and Business, so that your archaeological dig will determine how the ancient Phoenician Businessmen conjugated verbs.)

3.      Get involved in the activities on the campus, because it will become an important part of the rest of your life. (i.e.: Late-night Laser-Tag parties will help you when avoiding detection from Phoenician ghosts at that dig site in ancient Phoenicia. )

All this led me to realize that, if what these people with their various titles and acronums were saying was, in fact, true, then I must have completely done college wrong. (For the record: I don’t know anything about what the football player said to the students he led. I was too busy learning the pitfalls of financial aid.)

Anyway, when I attended college, there was no orientation, or "GO!" "COUGS!" chants. 

I just showed up at the school in early January, 1994 without any preamble.  No orientation, no acronym-program based on the school mascot (PAWS (WSU Cougars), HOWL (UW Huskies), GRAFITTI (Idaho Vandals.)) 

No "break-out" sessions, no Rose Bowl athletes. (Although, given the nature of my school’s football team, when I was a student, a football player who had participated in our last Rose Bowl would have been in his mid-to-late eighties.) 

None of that. I just transferred in as a Junior, having just received my Associate of Arts degree from my previous institution of lower learning.  My only orientation was provided by my cousin, Suzanne, who happened to be an alumnae from the school years before. 

To top it all off, I was already 24 years old and somewhat jaded about how much I was going to take on the challenges of the world. My biggest challenge was convincing my friend Henry to drive me to the store so I could get this week’s fill of Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola. My second-biggest challenge was playing the Star Wars Role-Playing Game with my friends Matt, Chris and the aforementioned Henry.

 I definitely wasn’t thinking about how I would use my Journalism degree with a minor in History to solve tomorrow’s problems. 

(I actually picked journalism in part because I figured it would be a depression-proof job. “If the economy collapses, I’ll be able to write about all the events leading up to it, and then cover it during the depression,” I would say.)

 I guess somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I entertained being the guy who cracked that Big Story exposing scandalous horrors and corrupt collusion. This was made all the harder because, for reasons that elude me, I always got typecast as a sports writer. (And let's face it... how many scandals occur in sports? Oh... that many?)

Either way, you don't know how many times I heard: “You’re a big guy, you can write sports.”

I learned a lot while I was in college: In addition to learning how to be a parent, I also learned how to write better (getting jokes into my stories without my editor catching them), how to use the Internet (ie: send e-mails to my friends and my then-fiancée) as well as the histories of four continents (Europe, North America, South America and Asia, although my “History of the Soviet Union” class didn’t get to the Russian Revolution until the second-to-last week of the semester.)

I also learned many of the “Urban Legends” of the campus, like why the face of the clock tower at the top of the hill glowed an eery red color at night.

I learned a lot, but I never really made the “connections that will serve you for the rest of your life.” (Aside from the aforementioned Matt, with whom I am recently reacquainted via Facebook.)

 I didn’t learn how to network, or how to “create social paradigms to further enhance my experience here and beyond.” In fact, in college, I only really made a small handful of friends, and I can only track down two of them. (Even then, one I speak to about once per biennium, usually when he’s back in Washington, or, if for some reason, I wind up in Arizona.)

One area that I did get right with my degree from Washington State University is this:  I got a world-class education, and I don’t have to wear purple and yellow to my homecoming. To me, that alone is worth more than all the “skills to solve tomorrow’s problems” in the world.

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