The Ithaca College Student Governance Council met Nov. 18 to hear from Caryanne Keenan, director of New Student and Transition Programs, about Fall 2024 orientation and plans for Fall 2025 orientation. The SGC provided suggestions on how Keenan could further help new students get acclimated to the college. 

The council also planned its last meeting of the semester, which will be Dec. 2.

NSTP organizes orientation, family weekend and the Tau Sigma National Transfer Student Honor Society. NSTP makes changes to orientation based on feedback from surveyed students, families, faculty, staff and orientation leaders. Keenan said NSTP aims to prepare students transitioning to college by connecting them to the campus and each other.

“We want you to feel like, ‘I have a home here, I feel welcome, I feel respected and safe, like I belong,’” Keenan said.

Some additions to Fall 2024 orientation based on feedback from Fall 2023 included mini golf inside the library, an arcade night, a disabled students’ social event and shortening orientation to five days compared to the usual seven days.

Keenan said NSTP has gotten feedback from students who were overwhelmed by the amount of information given to them during orientation. Fall 2024 orientation had eight hours of consecutive mandatory events. She said NSTP is looking for alternative methods to deliver crucial information to new students.

“I don’t want students to lose all the important stuff because you’re drinking out of a fire hydrant trying to take in all of the information,” Keenan said. “We’re going to try to listen to the feedback and see what works.”

Keenan said NSTP is working on other changes to Fall orientation like adding a more customized transfer student orientation, reducing the number of mandatory orientations events each day and changing the weekly newsletters the office sends out over the summer to new students from a weekly schedule to a bi-weekly schedule.

Feedback for NSTP

Keenan asked the council to provide feedback on what resources, support systems and programs would have been beneficial to them during their transition to college. 

Junior Caleb Cackowski, vice president of communications, said he would like to see the college do a better job at showing students the activities they can do outside of their major and school. He said that as a student in the Roy H. Park School of Communications, he did not know there were music groups he could join inside the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance without being an MTD student.

“I was really looking for something like that my first semester,” Cackowski said. “I didn’t know how to access it.”

Amelia Grimshaw, Class of 2028 senator, said it would have been helpful if there were more events for specific majors to help students in the same program bond with each other.

“I don’t know if it’s just because of the classes that I’m in right now,” Grimshaw said. “But I feel a disconnect from people that are in my major.”

Sophomore senator-at-large Joslyn Forcione said that as a first-generation student, she did not know what to expect from college. She said it would have been helpful if the college provided an information session to help students learn what the college’s expectations are.

“I remember coming on campus and being like, ‘I have no idea how to act,’” Forcione said. “I had no idea what the standards [were] in college from high school.”

SGC’s future plans

Junior transfer senator Login Abudalla said she is in the early development phase of working on creating an Ithaca College crash course. She said she is planning to meet with the office of Information Technologies and Analytics to pitch the crash course through a Canvas classroom. She said she also wants to work with Student Accessibility Services.

“I will also be reaching out to [SAS] to understand all of the avenues to present this information as equitable as possible,” Abudalla said.

Junior Senate Chair Nikki Sutera said that at the council’s last meeting of the semester the SGC will hear from Reginald Briggs, director of dining services, to discuss food and dining at the college. Sutera said she encourages the campus community to come to the meeting to ask dining-related questions while being respectful to dining services.

“Respect comes first,” Sutera said. “They work extremely hard. So come with open ears, open hearts, open minds and open values.”

The SGC is the sole representative body for the Ithaca College student community. The SGC can be contacted at [email protected].