Graphic by Kate McIntyre

Due to recent concerns that this past Week of Welcome (WOW) program was associated with an increase in alcohol consumption, citations and arrests, Vice President of Student Affairs Cornel Morton, who has been at Cal Poly for seven years, said the week before school this year was the worst in terms of alcohol use that he has seen. Morton is part of a committee recently formed to propose changes to WOW and the other orientation programs, some of which include a yearlong message campaign about the effects of alcohol abuse, notifying parents of underage drinking, keeping most returning students from moving on-campus during WOW and shortening WOW to three and a half days.

Morton wants to clarify that WOW is not responsible for the incidents that occurred during the week before school. In fact, WOW educates participants about alcohol abuse, encourages responsible community involvement and promotes drug-free activities, he said.

“WOW is not a bastion for alcohol abuse.”

Director of Student Life & Leadership Ken Barclay agreed, saying that WOW has a community service component, awareness programs and team building that mean a high retention rate of students returning for sophomore year.

“They also provide students with a big support group,” he said. “Many times it lasts throughout their years at Cal Poly.”

He added that they evaluate WOW and the other orientation programs annually, so having to make changes is not new.

Parental notification is another strategy being considered, not only during WOW but for the entire year, Morton said. It is permissible to notify parents when their underage student receives an alcohol violation under the 1998 Higher Education Act. Students will be told that their parents are being mailed a letter. The letter is not a judicial, simply a note of concern, Morton said.

Business junior Greg Hinchman said students should deal with legal consequences of alcohol and drug use on their own.

“Most of these kids are 18, so they (the school) should leave it up to the kid to tell their parent, because they’ll probably have to anyway,” he said.

This year, freshmen were on-campus 11 days before classes began. Barclay said they’re looking at how to best deliver the orientation programs next year without having so much time between move-in day and the start of classes.

“I think it’s a long time to be up here before classes begin; I think it’s problematic,” he said.

The three summer orientation programs, Student Orientation, Advising and Registration (SOAR), Fall Launch and WOW will be scheduled closer together and all three will address alcohol and abuse.

This September saw the first Fall Launch, a program hosted by University Housing Saturday to Monday to establish a community dynamic, educate students about Cal Poly’s Learning Objectives and on-campus resources and connect students and faculty.

Ninety-eight percent of the freshman class (3,815 students) participated in Fall Launch Class of 2013. Of those, 1,263 took a survey after the program concluded. The results were positive, Associate Director of Housing Carol Schaffer said. The survey said that an overwhelming majority of participants were more familiar with the campus and felt connected to Cal Poly (95 percent) and met people they felt comfortable hanging out with (96 percent) and understood community expectations of making choices that are mature, responsible and respectful (97 percent).

The program was successful in helping students learn community standards and offering drug-free activities that set the standard for the year. It also helped students establish a support structure, Schaffer said.

“The ability to meet with students and have their attention for those first days to build community roommate to roommate, floor to floor and building to building, what I saw by Sunday afternoon was impressive,” she said.

The decrease in community standards violations from 2008 to 2009 indicated a 25 percent decrease; there was also an 83 percent decrease in housing license revocations.

In addition, this year returning students were allowed to move into on-campus housing a week before the start of school, but Morton said that University Housing is considering letting only certain students like orientation leaders, athletes, student volunteers and employees move in that early next year.

WOW already addresses alcohol abuse and consequences, but Andrene Kaiwi-Lenting, assistant director of Student Life & Leadership, said the program is making changes for next fall, including shortening the program from the usual five days to three and a half days next fall.

“WOW is resolving what it can … You will see significant changes, but it won’t be foolproof,” she said.

Psychology sophomore Geneva Licht said WOW shouldn’t be associated with alcohol consumption. It’s normal for freshmen to want to go out when they get to college; people off campus are facilitating the issue of alcohol consumption with a ‘WOWies are welcome’ attitude. The program tries to counteract the issue by keeping students late at night, but it can’t do much more, she said.

“I think the WOW program does all it can,” she said.

Kinesiology junior Chad Crockett added that returning students come back early because they know it’s a big party time, but there isn’t a feasible way to prevent that.

“It’s a large contribution, but it’s out of anybody’s hands, including WOW,” he said.

Kaiwi-Lenting said that WOW already offers freshmen opportunities to have drug-free fun with activities on-campus and in the local community from early in the morning to late at night, but it can’t and won’t babysit participants, she said.

“I don’t think it’s WOW’s responsibility to keep people off the streets, but it is to give them options,” Kaiwi-Lenting said.

Recreation, parks and tourism administration junior and 2009 WOW leader Ryan Swearingen, said he talked about alcohol with his WOWies and advised them not to drink, but knows that students will choose to drink anyway.

“Knowing that some students will still choose to drink alcohol, no matter how much you encourage otherwise, I advised my WOWies that above all, they need to be responsible,” he said. “They need to think about how their choices can affect them, and how they can affect other people as well.”

Swearingen does not like the idea of shortening WOW to three and a half days. Some of the main purposes of WOW are to meet new people, establish friendships and connections, become familiar with the campus and community and become aware of issues students face everyday as a college community. All of these things are critical to student success, he said.

“Shortening WOW in order to limit the opportunities for freshmen to drink/party/get into trouble is a great idea at first glance,” he said. “But before we jump into this, look at other schools. These kinds of problems happen everywhere, whether it is during the weekends before school starts or during the first weeks of classes. Before we decide to shorten WOW, we need to remember how much good WOW does, and look at how shortening WOW could influence that.”

The committee includes representatives from Student Affairs, University Housing, Student Life and Leadership, Campus Dining, University Police Department, San Luis Obispo Police Department and the Health Center. They are meeting weekly with hopes of presenting a plan to President Warren Baker and Provost Robert Koob early November.

Stock Photo.

Set to be the largest health study ever conducted on a college campus, Science through Translational Research in Diet and Exercise (STRIDE), a research project initiated in 2007 by the Cal Poly kinesiology department, will examine the physical health of college students and their awareness about their personal health.

Slated to begin next week, the project, called FLASH, will evaluate about 3,700 freshmen from the 2013 class, measuring various aspects of students’ physical health including body mass index, resting heart rate and blood pressure, as well as analyzing how students perceive their personal health.

Dr. Ann McDermott, the director of STRIDE, hopes that this research project will shed light on how and why a college student’s health varies over their college career.

“Statistics show that 37 percent of high school students are overweight or obese and that 67 percent of adults are overweight or obese. We want to find out what is happening in that four year period of time that is creating that big of a difference,” McDermott said.

One reason that might account for the 30 percent jump in obesity rates is that college students have a skewed view of their physical health, McDermott said.

Kyla Tom, a graduate student of kinesiology and student leader of FLASH, agreed that many college-aged people do not have an accurate understanding of what it means to be healthy.

“I think that a lot of college students look at themselves physically and judge their health by if they look fit or not. In reality though, a lot of risk factors for disease don’t depend on how low your body weight is,” Tom said. “College students might just not be aware.”

Acquiring the participation of such a large volunteer group poses a challenge.

“Getting freshman really interested in the study will be the hardest part. We’ve really been pushing social marketing and have been talking to the RAs to try to hype up the study,” Tom said.

Some forms of social marketing STRIDE will use includes a video explaining the study, which will most likely be posted online, and fliers in the freshmen dorms, Tom said.
Lauren Ferrigno, a parks and recreation administration sophomore, thinks that promoting the study is key in getting freshmen volunteers.

“I would have been interested in doing it as a freshman if I had enough information about it and knew a lot about why they were doing it,” she said.

McDermott feels that there will be plenty of students interested in learning about their health in depth.

“I think students will want to get involved because how many college freshman can say they have an accurate understanding of their body composition? I think many students overestimate their health,” McDermott said.

Nutrition freshman Jocelyn Fry, who considers herself a healthy individual, expressed interest in participating in the study this fall.

“I’d like to see how my body changes over the course of my time in college,” Fry said.

Jenny Graser, a liberal studies senior, however, would not have wanted to participate in the study.

“I think the study itself would be very beneficial and if they can get volunteers, then that’s great. I personally wouldn’t want to do the study because I feel like it’s private information that I’d be giving out,” she said.

Kelli DeAngelis, a kinesiology freshman, said that data obtained in California might be different from elsewhere in the country, but thought that it would reveal interesting information regardless.

“I feel like people at Cal Poly are generally pretty active. There are a lot of options for ways to stay active like the outdoors. And it’s free,” DeAngelis said.

The study will provide crucial information about Cal Poly students’ health that is currently missing for college-aged individuals.

“Basically, we have information for high school students and we have it for adults. There’s a gap in between those two age groups where we are missing the data for college-aged people,” Tom said.

In order to fill in the missing data representing college students, the freshman volunteers will complete a questionnaire and/or a physical exam.

The questionnaire will be e-mailed to volunteers and includes 117 questions about demographic information, perceived health, screen time (the amount of non-school related time students spend in front of the computer or television), alcohol and drug consumption and physical activity, Tom said.

In preliminary research conducted in spring 2008, residents from Sierra Madre and Yosemite dorms and students in large kinesiology lectures, such as KINE 250 (Healthy Living), took about 20 minutes to complete the survey.

After filling out the questionnaire, students will be encouraged to have a physical examination, which includes taking measures of height, weight, waist circumference, resting blood pressure, resting heart rate and body fat percentage.

The freshmen will undergo their first physical examination during their first quarter at Cal Poly, which is this fall. The next physical examination, conducted on the same group of volunteers, will take place spring quarter.

Including both a questionnaire component and an objective measurement component makes this study potentially the largest research project of its kind, Tom said.

Graphic by Kevin Black

When landscape architecture freshman Marissa Mondon arrived at Cal Poly, she expected to be handed a schedule, just like every other freshman attending. But she didn’t receive her schedule because her high school hadn’t sent her transcript in time. The stress most freshmen probably felt at their first day of class was amplified when she had to crash all four of her courses.

“I felt isolated, because no one else was in the same boat,” Mondon said.

Over the summer, 3,820 freshmen were scheduled into their fall quarter classes. The block-scheduling program worked, as evidenced by feedback from freshmen and by an increase in the average unit load freshmen take — from 12 units last fall to 16.

History freshman Liz Goralka said most of her friends are only taking 12 units, but she’s taking 16 because a professor at the summer orientation program SOAR advised her to.

“Most people I know except the honors students are in 12, but I signed up for 16 anyway. It’s kind of stressful, but not the worst thing in the world … It sucks that other people can go out and have more fun than I can,” Goralka said.

It will be easier to stay at 16 units than to transition from 12 to 16. Plus this way she won’t have to catch up later on, Goralka said.

“I might as well start hard and let it get easier. It’s manageable; it’s not like I want to kill myself every night,” she added.

Provost Robert Koob presented the idea of block-scheduling each freshman’s fall quarter classes last winter. Using information submitted by each department about what classes each major should be taking in fall, the provost’s staff assigned freshmen their classes over the summer, instead of letting them register for classes as students have done in the past.

Associate Registrar Debbie Arseneau said the point of implementing this new program was to keep students from falling behind by taking prerequisite courses early on.

“The goal was to get students started on the right track to graduate on time,” she said.

Given the short time frame for implementing block scheduling, most feedback from the freshmen and colleges about the program was relatively positive.

Associate Dean Roxy Peck said the College of Science and Math was happy with the block-scheduling process and its results.

“We have had very few calls from students who weren’t able to get classes this fall — even continuing students,” she said. “There have been noticeably fewer calls from unhappy students and parents, which I think is a sign that we did a better job of getting both continuing students and new students into classes. The first week of classes was unusually quiet for us in that respect.”

Peck said she asked freshmen what they thought about block-scheduling, and the response was uniformly positive, even from students scheduled into 7 a.m. classes.

“Two students told me that they had friends that were attending other universities that were having a lot of difficulty getting classes and that they really appreciated having a full schedule,” she said.

However, there were a few issues with the process, including the scheduling of students with AP credit and those with extracurricular activities, College of Liberal Arts advisor Wendy Spradlin said.

“We have students coming in with numerous AP exams passed,” Spradlin said. “If the university doesn’t receive their scores in time, they can easily be scheduled into classes that they don’t really need. That defeats the purpose of the effort.”

Spradlin said that block-scheduling works better for majors that are heavily specified, where students have to take certain classes to fulfill a requirement, but for students who have more freedom in their curriculum, like CLA students, it doesn’t work as well.

It results in students being assigned a course to meet a GE area instead of getting to choose the course they’d like to take to fulfill that particular area. For example, a student might be assigned ECON 222 for D2 but really would have preferred HIST 213, she said.

“Freshmen who are block scheduled haven’t been forced to review their GE options, so the realization that a different course would have been more appropriate for their educational goals does not come till later … It’s just more efficient to let the students choose the courses they take to fulfill GE areas.”