This fall, incoming first-year students at universities across the country will have the opportunity to go backpacking, do community service or explore the arts as part of their campus’s pre-orientation programs. These programs offer an opportunity for students to forge friendships and explore new interests in a supportive environment before campus-wide new student orientation begins. In contrast with New Student Orientation, which aims to foster connections between students on a larger scale, pre-orientation programs allow students to explore specific interests and make friends in a smaller, more intentional group.
Brown currently offers several pre-orientation programs, such as the Third World Transition Program, International Orientation, Mosaic+ Transition Program, Summer Transition Engineering Program and the Bonner Community Fellowship Pre-Orientation Program. While these programs are valuable, most are tailored toward specific affinity groups, and many require an application. This limited scope means that pre-orientation is not an option for many Brown students. The University should follow in the footsteps of our peers and offer expanded, diversified pre-orientation options to help new students feel at home.
Friendships are built on mutual understanding and meaningful shared experiences — pre-orientation provides the perfect environment for this. Whether students are volunteering at a food pantry or exploring local art galleries, experiencing new things alongside future classmates and friends allows new students to build a foundational connection with their peers and understand what their college social life may look like before being thrown into orientation week.
Some students at Brown come into college with connections that can serve as social foundations: peers from high school, siblings or family friends. However, these pre-fabricated communities are likely more common amongst students from well-funded public or private schools that send multiple students to Brown. For students who come into Brown knowing few, if any, of their new classmates, entering directly into orientation can be daunting. More expansive pre-orientation programming might help ease this transition with intimate, randomly assigned groups automatically increasing new connections and social integration. This can give confidence to students entering Brown without a social foundation by providing a supportive, smaller space for incoming Brunonians.
Brown prides itself on cultivating curiosity and community. Yet when students are most vulnerable — when they first arrive on campus — the University falls short of providing students with meaningful, diverse connections. A robust, broadly available set of pre-orientation programs would create a common starting point rooted in shared experience rather than preexisting networks. It would not replace the valuable identity-based spaces that already exist — it would complement them.
Brown has the infrastructure and organizational expertise to implement these programs, and Providence itself offers opportunities most universities would envy. Brown sits in the heart of a vibrant city, minutes from coastlines, forests and neighborhoods rich with history and culture. Well-designed outdoor and community-centered pre-orientation programs would introduce students not only to each other but to the place they will call home for years.
Our peer institutions have effectively implemented programming that emphasizes shared experiences to strengthen belonging between young adults transitioning to college. Brown should do the same. Expanding pre-orientation programming would deepen connection, ease anxiety and enrich the first-year experience. For Brown to maximize connectivity and community among first-years, bonding should start before the ice cream social.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board, and its views are separate from those of The Herald’s newsroom and the 136th Editorial Board, which leads the paper. A majority of the editorial page board voted in favor of this piece. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
