One goal of SOAR is to connect new students to the College from the beginning by grouping them with other students and introducing them to the campus.

Going to college for the first time can elicit a lot of feelings: excitement, anticipation, confusion. With the development of a new orientation program for students that incorporates advising and registration, Metro State is aiming to eliminate the latter.

SOAR (Student Orientation, Advising and Registration) is an all-day session for incoming students that consists of a morning information session and an afternoon of small-group activities that include meeting with an academic advisor and getting registered for classes, getting a student ID, taking a campus tour, activating the student’s Banner account and, if desired, registering for the First Year Program learning community. (To read more about the First Year Program go to http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/fys_twv6050609.shtml.)

“After SOAR, they leave here a Roadrunner,” says Judi Diaz Bonacquisti, associate vice president of enrollment services. “It’s a much more customer-friendly and efficient approach for the student, although it does require more work and staff on the front end.”

SOAR programs have been piloted, with up to 150 students at a time, for three summers at Metro State, most recently last week.

Building a stronger connection to Metro State from the get-go
“The whole premise of SOAR is that we’re not doing enough to emotionally connect our students with the College from the very beginning of their interaction,” says Denny Boyd, director of new student orientation. “We’ve been just giving them information…. But we believe that if they’ve spent more time (in smaller-group settings of only 11 students, which are led by experienced students), they’ll have a stronger connection to Metro State, and we’ll see better retention and involvement with the College as students and even as alumni.”

In the current (non-SOAR) orientation, new students attend a half-day information session, and then are on their own to complete all the tasks necessary to register. “Sometimes when a session ends, 100 students flood Academic Advising at once, and some end up having to wait several hours – or just give up and go home,” Diaz Bonacquisti says.

Prior to advising students in a SOAR session, staff review students’ academic records, prescreening assessment results and test scores. Students attending SOAR sessions must have either taken their assessments or have sufficient grades or test scores so that they don’t need them.

A pilot program with a goal of expansion
Boyd says his department’s goal is to enable every new student required to attend an orientation – generally about 4,000 per year – to go to SOAR. This year he’s piloting the program to 400 students.

“The pilots have been very successful in helping us to identify and work out the big issues that we need to resolve before taking (SOAR) to a larger scale,” Boyd says. These issues include accommodating the students’ advising needs with a limited number of staff, the costs of providing new students with breakfast and lunch, and recruiting and training a sufficient number of student orientation leaders to lead the small groups around.

Sue Jean Kim, a graduate student from Columbia University who is one of three interns in the New Student Orientation office working with SOAR, knows about adjusting to campus life in an urban school from her time in New York City. “It’s harder to get connected, particularly at an urban commuter school,” Kim says, “though it’s important to, and it’s an important time in these students’ lives. The student orientation leaders (and peer mentors) help the new students start connecting to a small group right away.”

According to Diaz Bonacquisti, SOAR also ties in with a number of other admissions and enrollment initiatives, such as the push to have students complete their assessment and remedial work before registration and the promotion of the First Year Success learning community.

“SOAR really serves the students well,” says Diaz Bonacquisti. “It represents an efficient use of their time, especially for those who live far away. They come to campus once, and they get everything accomplished that they need to.”