Author: Jeremy Childs
First-years and Resident Advisers (RAs) alike have expressed frustration regarding the inaugural run of the First Year Residential Experience (FYRE) program, managed by Residential Education and Housing Services (ResEd).
“When it’s so blatantly obvious it’s not going to work, what’s the point?” a first-time RA said, who agreed to an interview on condition of anonymity in order to maintain RA privileges.
The program, designed to be a continuation of Orientation, requires first-year students to meet once a week to discuss a variety of college issues, such as sexual misconduct, alcohol consumption and healthy relationships.
“In general, we’re hoping the students are more educated about the resources here on campus and how to use them,” Director of Residential Education and Housing Services Chad Myers said.
Although ResEd spent much of the past summer preparing for its FYRE sessions, several unanticipated problems have emerged, such as the large size of the discussion groups.
“I don’t know all their names yet, and I probably won’t remember them after we’re done. Why aren’t the groups smaller?” the same anonymous RA said. FYRE groups contain a maximum of 25 students, about twice the size of an O-Team and larger than most seminar classes at Occidental. However, ResEd claims these groups are the smallest they can be.
“We took the incoming first-year class and divided that by the number of First-Year RAs. We have 23 First-Year staff members, so we needed 25 people max per class to fit all the first-years,” Myers said.
Originally, the leaders of FYRE were going to be volunteers, similar to being an O-Team or OxyEngage leader, but ResEd decided to limit the program to RAs in first-year halls. They also changed the original plan of offering FYRE leaders school credit for their work. Now, RAs do not receive compensation for the additional hours of work they have to put into the FYRE sessions.
“There are no rewards and it was completely sprung on us,” the anonymous RA said, noting the fact that RA applicants were not alerted that they would be responsible for FYRE sessions until job training had already commenced.
The educational resources ResEd provides to the RAs in order to assist with FYRE meetings have received mixed feedback as well.
“[ResEd] creates the structured curriculum. Some of the activities are surface-line…I’ve brought in extra sources and materials to make them go deeper” a second first-year RA said, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his or her employment.
Despite its educational intent, FYRE has actually had the opposite effect on many first-year students due to the redundancy of covering topics discussed in other mandatory sessions like Think About It and Orientation.
“It’s been drilled into us so many times…people don’t take it seriously,” Anya Weis (first-year) said.
First-years who do not show up to a FYRE session or complete the online component have a hold placed on their student account. After the FYRE program ends on Oct. 22, students who have holds on their account will get the chance to go to a make-up FYRE session during the following two weeks. By making the program mandatory, ResEd hopes to make sure the whole first-year class benefits from it.
“I don’t think the program can be a failure. We’ve succeeded just by them having the conversations,” Myers said.
Students will soon get the opportunity to provide feedback on FYRE, as ResEd plans to administer a program assessment survey with the Office of Institutional Research, Assessment and Planning after the last week of FYRE is complete.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
