As a transfer student, understanding and networking with the executive offices at the ASUO was not only convoluted but also secretive. Any information I was able to access was never relayed consistently, nor was it adequately organized. I was often times looking into websites because any introduction to the community and their practices wasn’t there.
In addition, the information I found was often too late to be useful, putting me past deadlines. These kinds of actions are not helpful to anyone, and only work to reinforce an ASUO that is not representative of the university as a whole. With household incomes only decreasing within the past years I believe it would be safe to assume that more transfer students such as myself are going to need stronger support and resources to get us going.
Now to be clear, this doesn’t include educational support — our time at our previous colleges will have oriented us for handling college-level classes — the one thing we aren’t prepared for is the structural changes and the many roles played by the diverse institutions here on campus as they are fundamentally different from whatever college we came from. Orienting not only freshmen, but transfer students as well is crucial to maximizing the potential of our University’s student community.
For this reason and the one written by Emily Schiola (“ASUO internship class poses problems for some students,” ODE April 25, 2012), I am deeply disappointed by the ASUO administration and lack of initiative on such a crucial factor to their success.
The students running our important organizations on campus should be constantly searching on how to involve University students instead of competing for their authority on a nondemocratic level.
Christopher Thomson
University student@@http://uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/Christopher*Thomson@@