Going into OSCA right away?

megame18
Fri, 06 May 2016 00:21:41 +0000

I think at most colleges, until you can connect with a small group of friends you won’t have a super satisfying experience, and in my experience Obies are not the most inviting group. There are no hall events, no greek life, and very few school sponsored social events. There may be an ice cream social or two hosted by clubs during orientation but that’s about it, so finding that small group can be hard freshman year since you probably won’t be too involved in too many clubs or declared a major yet, especially if you’re not very outgoing. The co-ops can be super helpful in providing this group, so my recommendation is to give it a shot first semester! The transition to college can be hard but eating most of your meals with the same 80 or so people, compared to going to one of the dining halls with the other 2,000 students not in OSCA, can really help in providing a small comfortable space. Also, you can drop the co-op at pretty much any point in the semester so if you decide it’s too much work then you can always switch to the normal cafeteria!

Also, I know you said just dining so I’m assuming you’re going resed for housing and in that case my recommendation is to ask for a first year experience building and apply to Kahn. It’s supposedly “environmentally friendly” or something but most importantly it has air conditioning, which means that at the very beginning of freshman year a lot of people who don’t live there will go hang out there to watch tv and not be hot, so you can easily connect with people that way.