The first day of school is always a little nerve racking. It doesn’t matter how many “first days” you’ve had. However, it is also very exciting. My first day at Stenberg was just that; exciting and nerve racking. New people, new environment and a whole new routine but I very quickly realized how nice everybody was and how amazing all the girls in my class were. We spent the first day getting to know one another and getting to know Stenberg. We learned about the rules, regulations of the college as well as what to expect in the upcoming months. The first day was also when we got our photos taken and got our Stenberg College ID’s which was pretty exciting.
Cristina, the Student Services Coordinator for our cohort did our first day of Orientation. We spent most of the day going through and discussing the Stenberg College Student Handbook. We went over things such as the college goals, school policies and procedures, the resources Stenberg provides for students, academic policies and attendance policies. It was very informative and cleared up a lot of questions many of us had.
Cristina was wonderful, she was kind and very easy to approach which made our first day less intimidating. As the first day came to an end, I was less worried and more excited to see what the rest of the week would bring!
The rest of our Orientation (which was a week long) was instructed by Mark. Mark was such an amazing instructor and the whole class loved him! He not only made orientation fun but taught us a lot in the week we were with him. For each day of orientation we got a new package that we spent the day going through. The first thing we did with Mark was introductions to get to know our classmates. The rest of the day was spent learning about studying habits, prioritizing our busy lives and setting goals .
Another thing we focussed on was test preparation and test anxiety. We got to participate in lots of discussions and input our opinions. This really helped open everybody up and make everybody more comfortable with one another. Mark made it a very caring and safe environment for everybody. I remember feeling excited and determined to apply everything we had learned that day to the rest of the program. The next day was spent going over different studying resources that Stenberg gave us access to. We learned about websites such as Ebsco (which allowed us to go online and access thousands of articles and online books), Evolve and CINAHL. We got to do activities to get hands on experience with these different websites and get a little more experience using them. The last few days of orientation consisted of learning about plagiarism, different styles of writing and learning, and developing personal skills.
The week of orientation was a nice warm up and reminder of different study skills. It also helped everybody get to know one another. It was comforting and I felt very prepared for our first course. On the last day we got to have a potluck and enjoy making it through our first week of our program! Since the first week was so informative and such a success, I had a good feeling about the rest of the program.
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