Orientation day Fall 2008

Wow, what a great first day! The orientation the iSchool provided was great. You know the day will go well when it starts with free food and coffee, always important that elixir of caffeination. That, coupled with seeing some familiar faces from the open house, plus a lot of new people to meet and get to know started the day with a high level of energy and anticipation. The pictures they took of us all were very helpful. Going through the list of 10ers on the intranet and putting names to the new faces helps a lot.

The Dean's welcome was perfect, short and to the point: A sincere welcome to the iSchool and Berkeley.

Next up was the group photo. The photographer had all 40 of us on the stairs, arranged by height. It really was amusing, if rather cozy. 'You, turn this way, you up on your tiptoes, you in the front, yes, you who are already the shortest, make yourselves even shorter. Everyone get very close to your neighbor.' We'd not yet had class, but already they were prepping us for Information Organization and Retrieval.

For once the team building exercise was a lot of fun. I've been working in the corporate world for a while now and these are usually not a lot of fun. Either you get team mates who are too cynical to give a sincere effort or the people running the exercise don't know what they are doing. Not this time! I had a great team and we all got into building the tallest tower we could with corks and toothpicks (tied for tallest at 79 inches, thank you very much). Our bridge of hot glue and popsicle-sticks did not fare as well however. Congratulations to team 2 for defeating the machine.

So, to avoid being too wordy, the rest of the day was full of great and helpful information. Panels on careers (the MOT cert is a good thing and one former iSchooler is looking to hire), career services (Meg, Shirley and Lety are amazingly helpful), student affairs (get your MIMS t-shirt), and computing services (remember, treat your IT support kindly and your time here will pass more smoothly).

I had a great first day. My favorite part happened around 3:30-4:00 when we first years found our way to the lounge and started going over our first day impressions (all good) and met and asked hundreds of questions of the second years in the lounge. Everyone was kind, welcoming, and very helpful. It continued as we moved on to drinks and fried food (my favorite flavor, fried!) at Raleigh's. It really set a wonderful tone for my time here at the iSchool.