Happy first day of the semester!
Ayesha Kidd, CSN’s associate vice president for organizational development & effectiveness, and Patrick Rodriguez, a senior analyst in Human Resources, helped students find their way around campus on Tuesday.
CSN is huge, with three campuses and 35,000 students sprawled across Clark County. It can be intimidating to new students, and we understand. That is why we deploy the Welcome Back Crew across our campuses during the first couple days of school to help students figure out where they’re going and what they’re supposed to do.
It turns out, this is an excellent idea, for lots of reasons, many of which you wouldn’t expect.
There were one or two students came to the wrong campus (If this was you, we strongly recommend should contact your instructor). Or, there were a few who came to class on the wrong day (your classes start Wednesday or next Monday, no worries!).
But many students needed help finding the bookstore, or, for instance, the confounding classroom B 121 on the Charleston Campus. Tucked in an unsuspecting hallway, B 121 flummoxed more than a few students this morning, whom the Welcome Back Crew, saved from being late.
These faculty and staff gurus have among them generations of experience navigating CSN and piles of campus maps, instructions on how to get into your CSN email, MyCSN and Canvas accounts, and a printed class schedule to help students who didn’t have theirs with them.
One Welcome Back member, LeAnn Silvia, a CSN alumna, helped guide students this morning into the D building, where most student services are located at the Charleston Campus. Ayesha Kidd, CSN’s associate vice president for organizational development & effectiveness, helped staff the table in that building. She said the most frequent questions were about registration: How to do it? Where to do it? And when to do it by?
Yes, you heard that right. Students continue to register on the first day of class. In fact, students can register through Jan. 23. We want you here, guys. So sign up.
We want you to be successful, too. That’s why we braved the cold, or got to campus before our shift, to help guide you. It’s what we do. We’ve been waiting for weeks for you to arrive.
The idea behind the Welcome Back Crew is that a little bit of help can go a long way.
We don’t want college to be scarier than it has to be. College classes are hard enough without getting lost on the way.
There’s plenty of research to back up the claim that helping students with the little things can go a long way toward helping them accomplish the bigger ones — including graduating. Students who feel comfortable in school are more likely to stay, and more likely to come back.
That’s what we want. We want you to stay. And we definitely want you back.