A look at Freshman Orientation from 1865 to present

The very first group of new Vassar students, arriving just as excited and nervous in 1865 as Vassar students do today, didn't have nearly the same type of orientation as their modern counterparts.

The 353 girls who arrived on Sept. 14, 1865, ranged in age from 15 to 25. "I know they all sat down right away to write letters home," said Professor of History Rebecca Edwards. "A lot of the process was meeting one's roommate and settling in," she said. Four-fifths of the girls would have roommates as first years, and apparently did have some freedom in deciding where to go; the anonymous student whose 1869-70 letters comprise the book Letters from Old-Time Vassar wrote, "they asked me if I would like to live on the fifth floor, but it is too near the sky line."

Once at Vassar, students often had to wait for classes to be organized. Christine Ladd-Franklin '69 wrote in her diary on Sept. 22, 1869 that she was "tired of having waited more than one week without having a single class organized." The classes could not be organized until the girls took entrance exams, which for the first three days lasted from morning until late afternoon with one break for lunch.

Part of the problem was the great variation in the girls' education prior to Vassar. "It was difficult in the early years to tell if they were ready [for college work] or not, because there was no SAT and no national curriculum. So a girl who knew Latin might have studied with her older brother or at a girl's academy," said Edwards.

The entrance exams determined if a girl was prepared or not, and President John Raymond was distressed to find that many of the girls were not on the level he expected in order to enter as freshmen. He established a preparatory department for those girls who did not score well, encouraging them to stay on for a semester or year until they were proficient, at which point they would enroll as students in "full standing." The first admitted Vassar freshmen learned Latin, mathematics, natural history, English composition and their choice of Greek, German or French for the first semester.

Since everyone lived in Main, the girls developed class, rather than dorm pride, and the freshmen created their own songs and traditions. One favorite pastime was, according to Edwards, tricking the Lady Principal, Hannah Lyman, by sneaking into friends' rooms after hours. Edwards said that the Lady Principal "was seen as an enforcer and a preventer of fun for those girls who tried to bring in visitors claiming to be their brothers."

Students also defied the Lady Principal in other ways. "I know that every year [Lyman] wrote to the girls, don't bring any ball gowns, we won't be having any balls. But each year some of the more elite girls brought ball gowns," said Edwards.

One crucial part of those early weeks was making friends and fitting into the community. Girls wrote in their letters and diaries about walking around the campus and Arlington while discovering their new home. Mary Harriott Norris wrote in The Golden Age of Vassar that the class pride and camaraderie created a "cosmopolitan spirit" that was "silently, stealthily driving out a narrow provincialism in which many a girl had hitherto lived." The friendships formed between girls from North and South, East and West were very important following the Civil War.

Although today's freshman orientation may be more structured, students hoping to feel welcomed and included is as much of a concern in 2011 as it was in 1865. Dean of Freshmen Benjamin Lotto said that the current orientation has two main components: academic and residential. "Both are essential in different ways," Lotto said. "Obviously getting the freshmen academically registered, enrolled and advised is a big part of orientation. But it is also designed to introduce them to the Vassar community, and what it means to be a part of that community."

"Every year orientation is different, but we've had programming about a week prior to move-in since the late '70s," said Dean of Students D.B. Brown. One of the biggest parts of freshman orientation is the student fellow program, which was developed during one of the first coed classes in the early 1970s. "It was created to provide peer advising support for first-year students in that transitional phase," said Brown. "It's moved from counseling to Residential Life, and now the student fellows are more of a part of the House Teams. So there's a lot of in-house support for the new students."

Many of the programs during that first week—meeting with academic advisors, fire safety, Arlington Amble, the tours of the health center—allow the students to learn the regulations of their new school.

In 1913, Lucy Maynard Salman developed a comprehensive freshman orientation plan, "which would open up every single part of the College, for two to three days, for the freshmen to see places like the greenhouses, the sewage systems and the business offices. She wanted them to see how their college was run," said Edwards. These tours were never instated, although Edwards agrees it would be an interesting concept.

Any freshman tired of the long days of tours and talks might look back and see a day trip through the orchard as idyllic, but the resources available today vastly outnumber what was available for freshmen in 1865. And although 146 years have passed, Edwards believes the class entering in those early years "probably had the same feeling as freshmen today: a little excited, a little anxious and a long way from home."