BY Ingrid Yeung ’23
After year-long complications of COVID and difficulties of international traveling, students and faculty members are finally back on campus together in the 2021-22 academic school year to engage in in-person learning. With over 140 students completely new to the campus— which includes new freshmen as well as returning students who had stayed fully remote last year as their first year of school— this year’s orientation is surely different from all other years. Student leaders arrived a few days early, just as in previous years, to receive leadership training and to simply get used to the typical campus life after hybrid learning. Since we have a significant amount of students unfamiliar with campus, not only did the normal orientation run for an extended period, the school rearranged the first two weeks of school to accommodate what we called extended orientation.
The regular orientation period looked different from the previous years to facilitate new students to connect with their advisors, teams, houses, forms, and even quad teams before the school officially started. In previous years, the students would arrive on a Thursday, participate in orientation activities tightly packed into two days, and school would formally begin on a Saturday. This year, however, the school hopes to ease the transition into St. Mark’s Schedule to reduce the overwhelming feeling. With all the activities dedicated to including new students into the SM community, the school sought to minimize the feeling of being left out and stressed.
Extended orientation took up one color block in the regular schedule every day for two weeks also for the purpose of ramping up and giving the students a slow start to the year. Each day, extended orientation took an eighty-minute block, while most activities were intentionally planned to occupy only forty minutes of the block. It gave students and faculty members an extra forty- minutes every day to breathe and break during the first two weeks of school. Not only for easing in, extended orientation also spaced information, which would usually be packed in two days of orientation, for the students to retain it better. Different extended orientation blocks tackled different areas of concerns, Pathways affinity groups, mindfulness, consent and rules, meeting with PDGs for the third formers, etc. The extended orientation hosted various activities and information sessions that generally would not be part of the orientation in order to inform new students more about the community life in St. Mark’s. To this end, the extended orientation gave the whole school an easy transition into the tightly arranged regular schedule.
Comments and opinions regarding the new form of orientation varied. Some students had fun during the orientation activities, while others felt a little overwhelmed and pressured. Since this is the first year that St. Mark’s tried this new form of orientation, there were imperfections with event planning and schedule communication. However, the school will soon reach out to the community and ask for feedback on the orientation and the change in schedule in hope of modifying it to accommodate the community better.
