Orientation Summer Plans | EP 4

David Jones:  Hello and welcome to our next episode of our family podcast from Minnesota state university Mankato. I'm excited to be joined today by one of our, long-term leaders here within our division of student affairs, enrollment management. It is Nikki stock director of student engagement initiatives, and pardon me, director of student engagement.

Initiatives and assessment. It's a relatively new title here from the work that she's been doing. And I'm excited to have her spend some time with us here today and share us a little bit more about to , well, mostly about orientation, things that are going on and students and families are preparing to learn more about the university have to start in the fall.

So with that, Nikki welcome. Thanks for carving out some time to meet. 

Nikki Stock: Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. 

David Jones: So to give folks some background, how long have you been at MSU? 

Nikki Stock: I, it will be 17 years in July. 

David Jones: Whoa, Whoa. And where have you worked in that time?

Nikki Stock:  All in the new student and family programs office, which used to be called the first-year experience office, but yeah, always here.

And then actually his fun fact is I was a graduate student here also a couple of years prior to that. And I also worked in the new student family programs office at that time as well.

David Jones:  Oh, perfect. So there's no doubt. You share all that cause you're quite the expert when it comes to what, what new students and families are preparing, asking questions and such like that.

I always love referring to. This office is kind of the one that, that parents and families at any point, if they have a question and they're not sure where to start, start with this office. Cause if you guys don't know the answer, you'll likely know where to find it. And that continues to ring true year over year.

So it is the incredible resource. So again, thanks for carving out some time to meet with us here today. So what's, what's all included within your office. What are all the responsibilities right now? 

Nikki Stock: Yep. So well within the new student family programs office the biggest program probably is that orientation and included with that as family orientation.

And so, um, orientation , we, we coordinate the programs for all of our new entering first year students, as well as our transfer students. And then I'm also online learners and Excel. Than it, ed. So we've got just different student populations that we coordinate those programs for. And then, like I said family orientation too.

We, we, you know, recognize that it's a transition for our family members as well of our incoming students. And um, we want to give them the resources that they need also to help their students be successful. And as they work through the transition. Another piece of our office. We do family communications and right now we have our e-newsletters going out every two weeks, so twice a month.

And we'll have you sign up for those actually you'll automatically get signed up for them. Um, Uh, if you are signed up with admissions we just kinda take your email address and add you to our newsletter. You can opt out if you choose. But yeah, that, and then we also do, we have our testing centers part of our office.

And and so the testing center is for math and English placement testing. And, and that's very new. That's just over a year. That we started the testing center. And so we're trying to build that a little bit. We have done some act testing and so we hope to expand different areas of testing as well.

So those are kind of the big pieces of the new student and family programs office. We also coordinate family weekend stuff like that. And then we help with our welcome week planning also. So just kind of, again, those things to connect our students to the campus and then connect parents as well.

David Jones: Excellent. That is a lot of stuff and a lot of important things that really make a difference for, especially the way our students start, whether it's from the testing center to the orientation. And of course, just any general questions you may have. So that's great. Great. So let's start, you mentioned orientation, it's kind of being, that's probably top of mind for our listeners today, as they're getting ready for this summer's orientation and what it looks like in the midst of a, of a pandemic.

And I always during these podcasts, I'm trying to reference today is April 15th. So any COVID information we share today is what we know as of today. So when you listen to it, It may change because it continues to change all the time, but Nikki, can you give us a high level overview of what orientation will look like for our new students and their families?

Nikki Stock: Right. Well, um, due to the planning that goes into orientation, cause it is a large scale program. We had to make the decision a while back already to have a virtual, primarily virtual orientation program. Again, this year. And um, we invite our students. There's kind of several pieces to that for our students.

And so they're invited to sign up for an orientation session and that session, if there is a session date that they will zoom into and get some just basic information from our assistant director for orientation. And then also I'm the director of academic advising. And that will be kind of the.

Start of their advising and registration process then and then we do have our orientation, the kind of the content or the stuff we need our students to know to be successful here in the fall. We've got that set up in D2L Brightspace, which is our learning platform here at the university. And so students sign in with their, their star ID and.

Kind of, it's a great way to students can start learning how to navigate  because they will be using it for classes also in the fall. So it's kinda nice. And that is part of the orientation. We also kind of teach them how to navigate to do well before they get into it. So, um, we are, so again, primarily virtual, we are in the planning stages.

We hope to offer a handful of on campus visit experiences yet for our students. Again, we're really in the early planning stages of that, we haven't set dates yet. We're looking probably at July for those. And you know, we're really still working around the physical, distinct guidelines that we have in place for that.

And so trying to figure out what makes the most sense and getting students the experience You know, a great experience on campus. But we also want that. I want them to have that opportunity of actually coming to see the campus and meeting other new first year students. And, you know, that's all part of the typical orientation experience.

We do do some of that virtual as well. We will offer up connection labs. They were the highest rated part of the program last year. Last year is obviously the first year that we did the connection labs. But that truly is an experience where we have our orientation staff, our orientation leaders facilitating about a one hour session with new first year students or transfer students as well.

We've got separate ones for transfer students and yeah, they just kinda get to know each other over zoom. You know, as best as best you can, but , um, th...