Pre-semester Preparatory Primer, Part IV: prepare for orientation

To wrap up our Pre-semester Preparatory Primer, today we’ll focus on Orientation. Don’t keep yourself in the dark about the unofficial opening ceremonies of the school year! Orientation is mandatory for all new students, and the Orientation schedule (available on the admitted student website) is worth a quick look ahead of time to get a sense of what’s happening when. Orientation covers a lot of information encompassing nuts-and-bolts logistics of being a student at Tufts (such as mapping your laptop to various Tufts IT services, making sure you’re straight on educational loan and scholarship processes, and ensuring you’re clear on all the graduation requirements for your degree program), as well as larger ongoing conversations on important topics for the full Fletcher community (such as diversity and inclusion, academic and behavioral codes of conduct, respectful engagement, and managing workloads and stress).

Almost every new student will arrive on campus with at least a handful of questions, and I can virtually guarantee that Orientation will provide an opportunity to get them answered. If you have a basic familiarity with the schedule ahead of time, you can come prepared each day with a personal to-do list, and an understanding of when you might have pockets of down time. I urge all incoming students to think of Orientation as an opportunity to learn lots of important details about Fletcher at once, rather than an obligatory formality. If nothing else, it’s a chance to meet your new classmates in a semi-structured environment before the semester really amps up. See you at Orientation!