New Student Orientation is coming up at William Peace University and for the second straight summer, future Pacers are back on campus.
Incoming Pacers can choose between two orientation options, either June 21-22 or July 19-20.
Prior to COVID Peace had an overnight orientation but went virtual during the pandemic. Last year the overnight orientation returned with rave reviews.
“We saw a lot of positive outcomes that we hadn’t seen with the one-day experience,” said Kristin Koch, director of Student Involvement. “Students rated their satisfaction with orientation higher, so did families. Students felt like they had made more connections, made more friends at overnight.”
Koch added the goal for in-person orientation was to provide more content than the one-day event, but space things out and make it less lectures, and more interactive sessions.
“More Gen-Z friendly,” Koch said.
The orientation process is broken up into three phases. The first phase is the Peace Moodle Course that future Pacers need to complete. The Moodle course provides a lot of campus resource information – financial aid, student accounts, and technology on campus — and the students are quizzed on important dates and deadlines to make sure they understand what needs to be completed.
Phase two is summer orientation, which takes place in June or July, and the third phase is Pacer Day, the session new students have to go through when they get here in August before the first day of classes. Students will also receive their schedules at orientation.
Koch and the student orientation leaders have a loaded schedule planned out for orientation but added more free time for students.
“That’s something [students] asked for so they can get to know people and have more unstructured time getting to know people,” Koch said.
Aside from getting their schedules, meeting professors, and getting all the academic information they’ll need before starting college in the fall, the students will leave Peace with a weekend full of the college experience to tide them over.
“Just giving them a taste of campus life is like here,” Koch said. “For me the most important thing for them is to make those memories during that time because memories will carry them from June until August of what to look forward to, so really cementing that into their brain.”
Learn more about new student orientation.
