Student XP / Arriving

The gap between orientation and actually knowing anything

Welcome week teaches you the map, not the territory, and the difference shows up around day nine.

Orientation gives you a lot of answers to questions you have not asked yet. That is not a criticism, it is unavoidable: nobody can tell you where to go when the printer will not work until you have a thing to print. So you sit through sessions, collect a bag, meet eleven people whose names evaporate, and leave feeling briefed. Then the real week begins and you discover that briefed and competent are different states. You do not know which building the short cut runs through. You do not know what happens if you email the wrong office. You do not know the unwritten timing of anything: when the good seats go, when the queue is worst, when the quiet floor stops being quiet.

The useful response is to stop treating this as knowledge you should already have and start treating it as knowledge you collect. Write things down, in whatever place you actually reread. Which office handles which problem. The name of the person who was helpful. The building that has the good microwave. The bus that runs later than the timetable suggests. Within a month you will have built a private manual of the place, and the reason it feels like everyone else has one already is that they are quietly building theirs too, in their notes, badly, at the same speed as you.

One more thing about that gap: it is the best possible time to ask obvious questions. Nobody expects a new student to know anything in the first month, and that permission expires. Ask where things are. Ask what a term means. Ask somebody to walk you to the room. The awkwardness of asking is about four seconds long and the awkwardness of not asking can run for a whole term. If a question is about your enrolment, your course or your circumstances, take it to the staff whose job it is rather than to the person beside you, who is guessing with great confidence.