Feature: My Orientation Experience

It was a Monday, and in the big assembly hall sat almost one thousand of us, fresh SHS one students just a week into the opening semester after gaining admission into the great Anlo Senior High School (ANSECO) to pursue various programs of study.

There I sat, a thirteen year old among other teenagers, and some, I guess older students all of us taking part in our first school orientation session or so I supposed.

At first, I was full of, I don’t know how to describe it – I would say I experienced mixed feelings. I cannot tell whether I was excited or anxious or hopeful.

Imagine that you are at a place for the first time where you see a lot of new faces from different places some speaking different languages you don’t understand.

Imagine you don’t know all of these new faces, and knowing that you have come to a stage in your young life where you have to integrate into another community much different from the one you are used to, making new friends and going by the set of rules and regulations governing that new community, great (ANSECO). Isn’t that enough to give a teenager much anxiety?

But wait, half way through the orientation exercise, I began to feel a little easy and calm.

Listening to the various heads of department as they took turns to take us through the session and as I have started interacting with some of my new mates and course mates, I realised the orientation exercise as a whole, was very valuable in informing and giving me an insight into expectations of my course of study.

It also led me to feel calmer as I approached my first semester and allowed me to be a lot more familiar with where I had to be. I thoroughly enjoyed the welcome session, course information session and the part where we were lectured on strategies for success. Everything was super helpful and I feel better. Its great to get to know so much students in a similar situation to mine and to meet some teachers and become familiar with some campus terms like “Nino,” “Green horn” etc, used on most SHS campuses to describe first year students. Isn’t that fascinating?

I appreciate the friendliness and energy from all the good people I met. Everyone was really welcoming as the program coordinators were easy to talk to and ask questions. All staff present were knowledgeable and were able to answer our questions and readily supplied advice. It was such a great and extremely helpful event. I really enjoyed it, thanks to all of the great staff of ANSECO and the great volunteers who helped to put such a fantastic orientation session together for us new students.

The excitement, the crowd, you could feel the eagerness with everyone trying to get some understanding and to better themselves.

Overall, I found the orientation quite helpful and would recommend all future students to attend.

I was dreading the event and thinking that I would be bored with some of the things I had read on the internet about SHS orientations, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Now I feel ready to tackle this new stage of my life and education head on.! God be my strength.

The Writer, Cassandra Ama Ayivor is a first year General Arts student of Anlo Senior High School (ANSECO).