<p>stylar, it is not necessary for parents to attend. For families who choose to save the $$, it’s fine. The students go off with their OAs and then have a pretty busy schedule of cool events and sessions with their majors, and there are a lot of fun activities on campus, too. You’ll be staying in a residence hall and eating all your meals with other new frosh so you won’t miss seeing a parent there, and the kids at Orientation are uber- friendly. Really. </p>
<p>Parents who are curious for more info from USC will find it a wonderful event to attend, if time and travel permit. Lots of details about the campus medical center, pharmacy (transferring Rxs) policies, housing and food plans, bikes and locks, plans for the student center under construction and other future campus plans, advice and rules for parking permits and campus shuttle, Greek life, so parents will get more information than they expected. </p>
<p>For instance, I learned how we can get out of paying for the USC medical insurance (our S is already covered on our family policy). All students are billed for this but taking a few steps right there saved us over $300/year. I’m not saying you can’t do such a thing from home (you can!)–but I would probably not learned the fine details of something like school med insurance (which I also learned is different from the mandatory USC health fee) and I can guarantee my S was not listening to/retaining that sort of minutia when there were friends to make and concerts to attend. </p>
<p>As far as school scheduling goes, some kids are completely on top of this for themselves. But some can get kind of like deer in the headlights when so many options and choices are put forth. So how much you may want or not want your parental units to contribute to putting a schedule together is up to each student. What is too-helpful to one freshman, might be lifesaving to another.</p>
<p>Last year, my S was in two programs that had conflicting times for advisement on the first day of Orientation and both REQUIRED that he attend their sessions. The same conflict happened for course registration the second day of Orientation. TO insisted students had to register with them and SCA had the same requirement because both programs used D-clearances for their courses. There are relatively few new Trojans who are in both SCA and TO, but it can be a little frustrating to try to be in two places at once. TO class descriptions are only distributed in TO advisement so you absolutely need to get those in order to select a class. And SCA gives its students their required schedules (telling which semester they must take which pre-reqs in order to be on track for graduation) in their own session. I wish they would change this–and perhaps they will. But since it was kinda crazy last year, a parent could attend one advisement session while the student went to the other. While this particular conflict wasn’t the end of the world, it did help to have a parent there. The good news is–you can go home, settle down, and work things out in the end even without a parent right on the scene. If you need to drop or add a class after the dust settles, it’s really easy. If you need to call and advisor later, you absolutely can.</p>