Orientation and Disorientation

Orientation at GSE (the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where I will be studying for the forseeable future) was held yesterday, in the conference and ball rooms of West Philadelphia's glamorous Inn and Penn hotel.

Now, I've only been to two school orientations in my life--this one and my undergraduate one, ten years ago, at Columbia. What I mostly remember about my undergraduate orientation at Columbia was dancing back-to-back with total strangers on the lawn outside Butler Library and having to listen to Dean Austin Quigley give what I could tell, even as a naive freshman and newcomer to New York City, was the same canned speech he gave every year.

Let's just say that, despite some amusing technical glitches, compared favorably.

For starters, it was only one day--not the week or more universities sometimes spend on orientation programs. A speech was given by the dean and by the head of admissions. Neither said anything controversial, but neither said anything useless, either. I half-suspected, however, that someone was paying the dean to do his best Lena Lamont impersonation, because he kept swaying his head side to side as talked, never seeming to get his words into the microphone. I was seated close enough to the front that I could hear him, but I doubt anyone at the back of the room understood a word he said.

The real verbal pyrotechnics, however, started when the head librarian came to the microphone. About midway through her speech, gremlins got at the audio equipment, and her voice kept going in and out, but rather than ask one of the technicians in the room to come up and fix the thing, she kept going on and on about rather technical things that sounded better suited to a library tour than a half-hour speech and PowerPoint presentation.

Thereafter, we took a break for a spot of lunch. I got to meet a lot of students, in various programs at GSE, both new and returning. It was interesting to find out that a lot of the returning students had changed paths within the school, and that's not uncommon for people to end up graduating in a different program or getting a different degree than they originally intended when they first came here.

Late in the day, I finally got to meet all of the other people in my specific program, which is called Intercultural Communication. Here, orientation gave way to disorientation as I found myself the only man in a group of twenty, mostly Asian women. Graduate education programs tend to have lopsided gender imbalances in favor of women, but I had not expected to be literally the only man in my program. It's not really an issue for me, but it will be an interesting experience.