By Zack Sampson, News Staff
When Nicole Daly came to Northeastern in January, she felt more at home in London than in Boston.
A Massachusetts native, Daly was admitted last fall into the N.U.in program, so she spent a semester abroad in England before moving to campus in January. After a brief orientation, Daly said she and her N.U.in classmates struggled to integrate into a freshman community that was formed before their arrival. N.U.in is a service-learning program that provides students with a chance to start their college education abroad before officially matriculating at Northeastern in January.
“For me it was really difficult, because when I went to London, the 50 of us, it was like instantaneous — we went out together every night kind of thing,” she said. “But here we just had class and homework and that was it and there wasn’t anything else to it and we didn’t really know how to make a life for ourselves in Boston.”
Daly connected to campus by joining organizations like the Student Government Association (SGA), where she found friends and an outlet for changing the process for Northeastern students starting school in January. Along with a few others, she started pushing for a new program to provide such students with more support. After more than half a year of planning, NU Starts — an initiative which bills itself as the “‘experiential education’ part of orientation” — was created.
“NU Starts pairs 10 to 15 students with an upperclassman group leader who will show them around campus, around Boston, and just give them an opportunity to get their questions answered and to meet other people,” Daly said.
The program will provide incoming students with a more accurate depiction of campus life, she said. Group leaders will take their students to the dining halls, hockey games and other events to introduce them to college life in Boston.
“Orientation does a great job of giving us factual information about the classes we need to take and how to navigate my degree audit and how many meals you have a week,” Daly, who is also SGA’s assistant vice president for student affairs, said. “But we all know that that’s really not what campus life is like, and there’s so much more to it.”
Forty group leaders have already signed up and 150 of the approximately 500 incoming students from the N.U.in, Jan-Start and U.S.-Sino Pathway programs have joined NU Starts this spring. During its pilot year, SGA is running the program with no cost.
The Jan-Start program is available for applicants admitted for the spring semester. They are not placed on a waitlist and can elect to join the N.U.in program. The US-Sino Pathway Program is a collaborative effort between several universities that is offered in eight cities in China and gives Chinese students a chance to study in America.
Sara Gormley, a sophomore international affairs and political science major and former Jan-Start student, said she plans to help with group leader support for NU Starts. She said she got involved to help ameliorate the awkward entry for students starting at the university in the spring.
“I found it hard to meet new people, I think a lot of us did,” she said. “A lot of the students that started in the fall had already found their friends.”
In her role with NU Starts, Gormley will help group leaders bring their students to events like afterHOURS concerts. She said she hopes to help incoming students experience Northeastern traditions, including things as simple as making a broomball team.
SGA Vice President for Student Affairs Jonas Edwards-Jenks said he believes NU Starts is a good solution to a problem that became increasingly clear this year after many Jan-Start and N.U.in students complained about their experience starting school.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty, confusion, when they first get here,” he said. “We feel like having that sort of safety net for them throughout the whole semester will be very beneficial.”
Edwards-Jenks and Daly said though NU Starts is currently SGA-operated, they hope the university will pick it up in the future because it is too large of a program to be handled entirely by students. NU Starts plans to have another program for transfer students in Fall 2012.
Though Daly said the creation of NU Starts was tiring, with work done mostly between classes and late at night, she maintained that the effort is necessary to open up the Northeastern community to late-starting students.
“I got an email from a girl, she said, ‘I just got placed in Speare. Do you know of anyone else that’s placed there? How does that work? What kind of bedding should I get?,’” Daly said. “And yeah, it’s going to take me another 10 minutes to answer that email when I should be writing my paper but that’s what it’s all about. It’s just answering their questions and easing their mind before they get here because they have no idea what to expect.”
