College Orientation for First-year and Transfer Student Populations:: How can the needs of both groups be simultaneously met during orientation and beyond?

Each autumn, millions of new students enter colleges and universities across the country. Orientation is an institution?s main opportunity to introduce and integrate new students into the campus community and culture, form class and institutional identity and prepare students to begin classes. Though the majority of new students are first-years, a significant number of participants are transfer students who have previously attended other institutions. During orientation, transfer students are in a unique position; not yet integrated into their college community, they are often considered equal to first-years, though they have previous college experience. Creating and executing successful orientation programming for transfers and first-years simultaneously is difficult but essential to achieve; it can be argued that orientation is the most important contributor to the social and academic integration of new students. The goal of my research was to understand how transfer students and first-years differently experience orientation and to provide a complete outline of how orientation can best support all new students: how can transfer students best be served during orientation?