By Editorial Board
Moving on to higher education is a sizable step in a student's life, particularly for anyone who is living away from home for the first time. It's for this reason that freshmen workshops are such a valuable asset to UP.
There are a number of things freshmen workshops do well, and the program should be commended for it.
Home base groups help students enjoy themselves, meet new faces and feel welcomed by the campus community. Providing a time for students to talk in confidence with other like-minded majors, even if they are undeclared, goes a long way towards grounding a student, both academically and emotionally.
Consistency in a new environment is key and home base groups implement with proficiency by forming each workshop out of students who share key classes together. Chances are upperclassmen can recall meeting some of their current friends back in those workshops.
The workshop's methodology of reaching out to students of all levels of preparedness is a necessary quality, regardless of some student grumblings. Some freshmen may like to think they're well versed in matters of public transportation, study skills and textbook reading, but not all are as skilled as others. And really, who doesn't enjoy a school outing to Safeway or Voodoo Donuts?
Workshops don't question students' intelligence; they merely build on it. It provides freshmen with information they all can use during their first year.
While it's in UP's best interest to run these workshops, there is nothing that demands that it does so. The fact that UP puts the time and resources behind them each year shows a level of investment in freshmen that doesn't go unnoticed.
Students benefit from the workshop by having a stable, reliable knowledge base to rely on, and the university retains more students that are more involved on campus and academically successful.
But for all the things that work well, there are others that could stand improvement.
We have great confidence in the power of peer advising, but the selection and training of freshmen workshop leaders needs to be retooled. As no job interview can detect and weed out every undedicated or impersonal student leader, we don't expect miracles, but a more discerning eye would be appreciated by freshmen that face themselves with a leader with little investment in their role.
Training leaders could also stand to improve. While training for new leaders clearly works, it doesn't seem to progress. A solution to training could lie in placing the veteran workshop leaders in charge of training new recruits. As it stands, second or even third-time leaders must go through the same training process as first-years. This is redundant and a noticeable waste of experience. And after all, there is no better way to learn a subject than to teach it.
While general study skills and the like are useful, focusing the lessons more on students' respective majors will keep the workshops on track. Workshops that focus more on the major's respective issues are a better way to introduce students to their future studies. They can get an overview of how UP works and what they will need to succeed in their studies, graduate and ultimately get a decent internship or even a job.
Workshops should embrace both what works well and what could work better.
