What I learned at Orientation

Due to events that won’t be mentioned here, I have been tasked with attending an orientation for FAU students and writing a two page paper about the experience. More specifically, this paper needs to contain what I’ve learned from the entire orientation experience; with the grace of the reader, I’d like to keep this fairly informal in order to make this as painless as possible for all parties involved.

Shortly after my arrival I received a, for lack of a better term, goodie-bag. The only reason I even mention this is because the fantastically well thought-out idea of including a planner for the school year. The only problem, is it was for last school year and the calendar actually ends in August of 2008. Now isn’t that just awesome? I wish I could go back in time and use it.

As I am sure you may know, the first stage of orienting students is answering the common questions that college students have. A truly brilliant idea was put into play here - make a game show! So we (myself and the other new students) played a game akin to jeopardy which I truly believe is a great attempt at keeping everyone attentive. Since this was the place to be to learn the answers to the questions, I was glad to see that we were expected to have some idea of the answer before we started our quest for higher learning. Thankfully, I knew the answers as I learned them through an arduous process of both Trial-and-Error and asking people who knew. Unfortunately, no prize money was being offered because that would have been truly exciting.

Even more unfortunate is that the answer that I was sent to discover was not provided in this jovial game. Since I had a serious question about the nature of the Bright Future scholarship and more specifically how the scholarship money is displayed when I would look at my balance online, after the game ended I approached the man in charge and asked him if he could explain to me how this works. It immediately became apparent to me, that despite the fact that this was the man running the show, he obviously didn’t have all the answers. My question was simple: How does the Bright Future scholarship get displayed when I look online at my balance, does it show the price before deduction or after deduction?

The answer it seems, is not so simple; I’ll have to paraphrase what I was told. Basically, it automatically deducts it except in the case when it doesn’t automatically deduct it and that there really isn’t any way to determine if the deduction has taken place or not. The only indicator of this deduction not taking place is that the value is higher than expected. Finally, I was directed to speak to someone at the Controller’s Office (a location that I am not permitted to make use of) or the Financial Aid Office. I’ve been to the Financial Aid Office in my previous quest for this information and I knew that was a dead end.

Needless to say, I was rather disappointed that the orientation that I’d heard so much about didn’t have the answers I was looking for. This leads me to the next logical question: Who does have the answer? The search function of www.fau.edu can’t locate a result for my query and I’ve been barred from finding out this information at the Controller’s Office for when I have to pay tuition for my fall classes.

This entire journey was an effort of futility. If anything, I have more questions now than I did before orientation. If the reader has any idea of where I should go, I beg you to enlighten me. And as for the summary of what I’ve learned at orientation, I can sum it up in one word: Nothing.