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Starting Fall 2023 With Celebration
To launch the Fall 2023 semester and welcome undergraduate students from the Naveen Jindal School of Management to campus, JSOM staff members planned their own Weeks of Welcome events. Beginning the Friday before classes started and carrying through to the end of the first week of class, Aug. 25, the JSOM welcome week entailed food, fun, and incredible opportunities for undergraduate students to meet, mingle and ask questions.
Food, Fun and Friends
The first event of the series was a kickoff event especially for new undergraduate students, both freshmen and transfers.
“We just celebrated them.” said Courtney Graves, director of undergraduate student services and primary planner for the JSOM Weeks of Welcome events. “We had Kona ice, we had games, we had T-shirt decorating, just lots of different things going on so students could feel welcome, meet their new friends, meet peers.”
Throughout the first week of classes, JSOM undergraduate students enjoyed events every day. From ‘Survival Snacks,’ which was an assembly-line of chocolate chips, pretzels and gummy bears, to ‘Networking Bites,’ where students mingled with JSOM leaders while enjoying hors d’oeuvres.
The week concluded with a special brunch with Dr. Dawn Owens, the Jindal School’s new undergraduate dean.
Gratitude and Energy for the Semester Ahead
“I wanted to see students smiling, meeting new people, was just hoping they would be grateful for a snack, you know? We fed them during every event,” Graves said.
Graves was delighted to hear how thankful students were for the opportunity to start the semester off strong.
“We heard over and over from students how grateful they were,” she said. “You know, ‘This was fun. Thanks for doing this.’ We had some students come to four or five of the seven things we planned. They made jokes that they knew they would at least be fed that day. There was a couple where we kind of forced them into sitting at tables with people they didn’t know so they were networking with other people. Just having the ability to meet their program directors, just over and over again, in various ways, they expressed their gratitude for the events whether it was just food, making new friends, or getting knowledge they didn’t know before.”
