Press Release

First Year Students Fear "Where Are My Classes?"

New students coming to school all have a similar fear - will they be able to find their classes on the first day? My partner and I developed a program to be implemented into SUU's Orientation - Thunder U. This program is called the "Where are my classes?" Tour. With volunteers, my partner and I provided tours twice during orientation. These tours were specific to each student, showing them the exact location of their classes for the following Monday. The tours also included showing the many resources on campus including Writing Center, Library, and Testing Center.

The “Where is my class?” Tour was a benefit for both students and parents. When students who had received, tours were asked if the tour was helpful and if they would want it to become a permanent part of orientation, they answered with a resounding yes. Chelsea agreed that the tours were received well by both parents and students. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, only a desire to have more tour guides was expressed in the negative. Students Natalia and I personally took on tours expressed much gratitude and commented how cool and useful they found the tour.

My partner and I were in Chelsea Buck’s Leadership class when we developed the idea for our project. It was an assignment in class to create a program which would be useful to first year students and we immediately knew that a tour would be perfect! Our assignment won out of six other groups, so my partner and I determined we truly wanted to implement the program as our EDGE project. The EDGE program is an important part of the education every student receives at SUU. Every student is given the advantage of completing an experience project. Having an experience project on a resume is a wonderful advantage that SUU provides to all its graduates. My partner and I were so pleased to be able to use our First Year Student project as our EDGE project as well.

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Kyra Payne

702-575-0248

kyrapaye@suumail.net