What is New Student Orientation?

Congratulations and welcome to BYU! Soon you'll be headed to BYU for your first real taste of life at a university. Your experience as a new student will begin with participation and attendance at New Student Orientation (NSO). New Student Orientation is offered to balance the needs of new students by combining the appropriate resources, activities, and personnel to help you "connect" early and successfully to multiple campus resources. Many of the activities are organized around Y Groups, small cohorts of students led by upperclassmen that offer an opportunity for you to ask questions and acquaint yourselves with other new students.

NSO seeks to establish the proper balance of spiritual, social and academic concerns; we define NSO as a campus-wide series of unified activities intended to create the following within each student:

• The discernment that the Spirit is an integral part of "the BYU experience"
• A growing sense that success at the university requires the use of the mind
• A sense of belonging to a community of like-minded individuals.

NSO is an essential part of your preparation for the many opportunities available at BYU.  We look forward to seeing you soon at New Student Orientation.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of New Student Orientation is to help new and transfer students become familiar with the academic, spiritual, social, and personal challenges and opportunities at Brigham Young University, and to provide information about campus life. New Student Orientation provides learning opportunities for students to become acquainted with the resources available to them on campus and to become more fully integrated into the University community.

Guiding Principles

• Concern for the individual student.
• Small group settings to foster student involvement.
• Accurate, clear materials, presented in a timely fashion.
• Evaluation, by students and other participants, of the NSO experience.

Focus

For new students, the importance of socializing with fellow students, of becoming familiar with campus, and of beginning to gain a sense of BYU's marvelous history-and destiny-can hardly be overestimated. They are intent on learning about things provided by BYU-fellow students, buildings, social venues, housing, and so on. Unfortunately, many students are less intent on learning about the other side of the educational equation: what their responsibilities are toward their own education and toward BYU. Many new students do not reflect on their purposes and motivations-both actual and potential-for attending the university.

Understanding that reality, we focus our NSO efforts on establishing and encouraging habits of mind that lead students to consider thoughtfully this new and significant educational experience. NSO experiences are not intended to inculcate a certain thought pattern in students; rather, they are intended to encourage each student to raise-and to begin to answer-serious questions such as the following:

• What kind of person do I want to become? How might the university help me to attain that goal?
• Does the university setting require of me commitments and actions that I may not have adopted yet?
• What is the relationship between my studies and other experiences at BYU and what I will do for the rest of my life?

These are precisely the kind of questions fostered by a consideration of the "Aims of a BYU Education." We want new freshmen and transfer students, in other words, to inquire into, to ponder, what it can mean to be a student at Brigham Young University.

In trying to provoke students to ask questions of this kind, we understand that "NSO" does not designate exclusively a two- or three-day period, on campus, at the beginning of a semester. New Student Orientation also includes all contacts the university has with potential new students-initial mailings for recruitment, School Relations contacts, telephone calls, advising, as well as on-campus experiences that newly-enrolled students may have. Further, the term "new student" designates a freshman (or transfer student) through his or her first two semester/terms at BYU.