By Claire Williams ’30
Staff Writer
New Student Programs and Orientation (NSPO) is a series of events and activities that take place between new student move-in day and the start of classes for incoming first-years and transfer students. In my case, NSPO lasted four days, plus the evening of move-in day.
The Claremont Colleges all go about orientation differently, but a majority have one thing in common: their students leave campus during first-year orientation, going on trips to places like amusement parks and beaches. Scripps’ orientation varies from the other undergraduate colleges at the consortium; our orientation activities occur entirely on campus, except for an optional trip to Target. Staying on campus all week offers both pros and cons.
The main benefit of staying on campus is that students get to know the Scripps campus itself. I live in Schow Hall, and walking to Malott every morning – which is just a little bit of a hike – helped me figure out a way to navigate my daily routine. For example, I made friends who live in Dorsey, which I learned is closer to Steele Hall and the Scripps Rose Garden, which leads out toward Harvey Mudd.
The downside of staying on campus the entire time was the abundance of NSPO lectures that were, to put it plainly, not very interesting. Most of them contained important information about various resources on Scripps campus and the 5Cs, but I found it took up very little of the actual lecture.
Then there was one morning at Garrison. The lecturers would give us a topic (i.e., cats versus dogs) and whichever option we liked better, we would walk to that side of the theater. Then, a few volunteers from each side would debate each other to prove their point – and to earn free T-shirts. I guess this activity was supposed to help with conflict resolution, but I personally didn’t need to spend that much of my day debating whether TikTok was better than Instagram Reels.
Seeing as some other schools go to amusement parks and such for their orientation, I would much rather be getting to know my classmates at Knott’s Berry Farm than listening to people passionately state why vanilla is better than chocolate (although kudos to them for delivering such convincing arguments).
Another complaint I have is regarding alcohol education. One thing to note: the official AlcoholEdu was cancelled due to the CGU lockdown. Before coming to Scripps, new students were required to complete an online training session that consisted of three sections, including alcohol education. Each session took about an hour to complete. My question is: Why are we required to complete a preliminary, time-consuming training only to be lectured twice more about alcohol – or what should have been thrice more – during orientation? What I considered to be the most important information was included in the orientation lectures, so it seemed redundant to have completed the pre-seminar training online before even setting foot on campus.
I’ve said a lot about the negative aspects of NSPO, but there were some things I enjoyed as well! My overall favorite part was getting to know people. As an introvert, this can be kind of scary, and I thought it would take forever for me to make friends. However, I ended up meeting some amazing people who I love and could not be more grateful to know. Also, my NSPO ambassador – Lilah – was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. She was super fun to be around, and it’s been awesome to see her on campus throughout the semester so far.
Of course, the main attraction of NSPO this year was the brand new NSPO Olympics. At the beginning of the week, we were split into groups with an assigned color; each group made a name involving their color, a team flag, and a chant. The week’s events culminated in a highly spirited talent show, where each team showed off their spirit and charming routines. Our group, The Sexy Citruses (Orange is Implied), danced a line dance tribute to “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton.
At the Olympics themselves, there were two different rounds of events, ranging from a paper airplane toss to sharks and minnows. I competed in trivia the first round, and the hula hoop circle the second round. The trivia questions were pretty easy, which I was a little disappointed about, but our group did well. Also, we absolutely killed it on the hula hoop circle!
One improvement from last year: we didn’t take the class photo right after Family Farewell on move-in day! It was day two or three that we did, and we took it right before the Matriculation dinner and dance. I had time to put on a nice dress and touch up my makeup. If we had taken the photo right after Family Farewell, my eyes would have been puffy from crying, my nose would have been running, my hair would have been a complete mess, and my entire face would have been sweaty. This timing is a definite improvement from last year’s orientation, so … yay for that!
If I had to sum up NSPO in one sentence, it would be this: a scorchingly hot, boring-yet-at-times interesting sequence of days that I’ll never forget.
