The Real Outlook on O-Week

Kaitlyn’s Lifestyle Guest Outlooks

Kaitlyn Bell (she/her) is a Lifestyle Guest Columnist and first-year student in the ILR School. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you’ve ever been to summer camp, you haven’t — at least not until you have experienced orientation week at Cornell. Orientation week, commonly known as “O-Week” is the week before classes begin at Cornell University, something almost unique to the school. Students are expected to move in seven days before classes begin and spend the week walking record miles and doing the same events repeatedly.

GUEST ROOM | Be Curious, Stay Eager

Orientation week at Cornell is always fun. It can be FUN. “FUN.” Funnnnnn. Or just fun, which comes out sounding a lot closer to, “fine,” than “fun.” This year, however, was the most FUN. As a junior, two orientation weeks have come and gone for me.

MORADI | You Don’t Have To Like It Here

Somehow, every freshman is simultaneously horny and anxious and tired and excited and sweaty during O-week. Part of my on-campus job involves trying to parse through these feelings with first-year students, assuaging their fears and elevating their excitement. I generally try to keep things positive. I tell them how I love the Ithaca Farmers Market, Manndible oatmeal chocolate chip walnut cookies and running through Forest Home Drive. I slipped up last year when I was on a student panel for Cornell Days and a really perceptive prefrosh asked what I didn’t like about Cornell.

GROSKAUFMANIS | More Than Orientation

When I was a freshman, every reputable national newspaper had a 40 year-old writing about how to “do college” correctly and effectively. And while crumbs of their advice were useful, I also felt like the prescriptions for how to act and perform were more stressful than anything else.

First-Year Students Raise Concerns About Orientation Events at Student Assembly Meeting

Members of the Cornell Orientation Steering Committee and Student Assembly addressed concerns from first year students at a forum hosted during Thursday’s Student Assembly meeting at Robert Purcell Community Center. After concluding the S.A. general meeting, President Jordan Berger ’17 opened the forum by asking members of the community — especially first-year students — to come forward and share what they felt was missing from their transition to Cornell. OSC co-chair Ethan Kramer ’17 — along with OSC members Finn McFarland ’18 and Emily Hunsinger ’18 — fielded questions from the community. After a few minutes of discussion, ILR student Joseph Anderson ’20 sparked a long conversation on the required orientation events Tapestry and Speak About It by recalling a hostile exchange between a student moderator and an audience member during a Tapestry question and answer session. “At least in [my Tapestry event], it got very hostile between the student moderator and the students who were questioning,” Anderson said.