Purple everywhere — on the T-shirts administration and volunteers wore, on the welcome banner plastered across the wall and even on the drawstring bags handed out in front of Woulfe Alumni Hall.

Orientation had officially begun.

On July 11, St. Thomas welcomed the next generation of Tommies by kicking off the Orientation and Registration program for first-year students. Over the next couple of months, around 1,350 freshmen will go through O&R with about 150 students attending each of the ten sessions — and that’s not including transfer and international students.

But with changes like an emphasis on globalization and the re-branding this past spring, the day-long O&R program isn’t the same as previous years.

“It’s really exciting,” incoming first-year Cassie Froese said while she ate lunch at The View. “Being here, it feels so much more real.”

Froese, who was home-schooled up until her junior year of high school, said that she hopes her previous college experience through Post-Secondary Enrollment Option will have prepared her for becoming a student at St. Thomas.

“I am more familiar with the way colleges work now that I have taken college level courses, which will ultimately help me make wiser and more cost-effective choices in the future,” Froese said.

Meanwhile, the O&R Info Fair was in full swing on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center. The hallways were neatly lined with St. Thomas paraphernalia and tables chock full of information about on-campus extracurriculars.

Marissa Abara, a graduate of Wayzata High School, is a step ahead when it comes to being involved on campus. This fall, she will join the swimming and diving team, but she’s still looking for more ways to participate at St. Thomas.

“I want to do everything, but with swimming it’s going to be a big commitment, so I have to narrow it down,” Abara said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

The year-long process of creating O&R programs consists of meetings, strategic planning and the involvement of dozens of organizations, departments and people from all across the St. Thomas campus, according to Assistant Dean for Orientation and Retention, Josh Hengemuhle.

“Most students don’t even know about the massive amount of behind-the-scenes work that goes on,” he said. “The different presenters, the pre-planning, the facilities folk that help make sure everything is ready for us — if that’s not happening in-person pretty frequently throughout the year and pretty consistently, the program for 1300 to 1400 students can’t come together.”

Part of Hengemuhle’s job includes putting together the undergraduate intern team, selecting a graduate assistant and 12 orientation leaders and acting as the coordinating center of all the different departments and divisions involved with orientation.

“This is just a hugely collaborative process,” Academic Counselor Drew Puroway said. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to go out in the university and find another program that has so many different little areas of the university working together.”

For the past six years, Puroway has been the direct liaison for registration, which covers leading the creation of personalized schedules for each incoming student based on their placement exams and course preference forms.

For the first time this year, St. Thomas is holding a joint orientation for both domestic and international students on September 1, a step toward the strategic goal of globalization.

Additionally, following the re-branding this past spring, St. Thomas now has new logos and announced the university motto, “All for the Common Good.” But while the redesigned ID cards, name tags, and Powerpoint slides reflect material changes, Hengemuhle said that there hasn’t been significant changes to the O&R program content-wise, even with the new motto.

“That’s been our mission long before it was our brand statement. That everything we do here at St. Thomas, all of the education we engage students in … is to advance the common good,” Hengemuhle said. “Personal intention, dignity, diversity — they’ve been values at St. Thomas for far longer than that brand statement. That brand statement really is just pulling all of those together.”

The language of “All for the Common Good” has been added to orientation presentations. In past years, the student-focused presentation that outlined campus policies was called “UST Cares.” But this year, it has been re-named as “Living the Common Good.”

“If you didn’t know what it used to be, the change should be seamless,” Hengemuhle said. “This is just a slightly different framing of who we have always been at St. Thomas and who we have always strived to be. So what skin is on the lanyard or on the Powerpoint, to me, doesn’t matter as much as the content … We want to be in line with what the university is doing.”

Overall, Hengemuhle and Puroway want orientation to be a relatively stress-free, informative and fun day for everyone who attends.

“I hope students and their guests walk away with a greater sense of confidence that St. Thomas was the right choice for them and that they’re going to be okay,” Hengemuhle said.

“I don’t think the one-day orientation can ever do everything to assuage all nerves and make (students) 100-percent equipped for everything they’re going to face when they come in starting day one, but we’re going to do our best,” he added.

 

This story was written by Threesixty Journalism Scholar Danielle Wong.