1.3 NSO continues

4. At one o'clock, parents and young people separated for the first time. The students met their group leaders, grabbed ice cream, and then headed off to the classroom where their First Year Experience (FYE) class would meet that semester. It was quite a clever set up. One of their freshmen classes was designated a first year experience class, but it was much more than a class. It had attached to it a one hour class called "First Year Experience" that helped them adjust to college and involved a lot of pizza.

So Lucy's FYE class was connected to a required course called "Central Themes of the Bible." Mac's attached class was "Intro to Sociology." They were smaller sized classes of about 15 that made it possible for them to get to know a professor really well. Only the best and most helpful professors were chosen to teach those classes.

Then for the one hour FYE part, some activity was always planned involving either the professor or their group leader. One week they would go over to the professor's house for supper. Another week they went to see a movie. Around mid-term, they had a pizza party. Meanwhile, both the professor and the group leader met at least once one-on-one with every student to have coffee at the campus coffee shop, "The Grounds."

5. Meanwhile, the parents went to the recital hall to hear the president. She gave them a little flavor of the college, touting its three historic emphases of virtue, scholarship, and service. She especially encouraged them to let their children go, to let them become responsible for the next phase of their lives. She strongly suggested that they resist the urge to visit their children (or vice versa) for at least the next month.

Then at 2:30 was a Consecration Service, where the parents symbolically handed over their children to the Lord. The president spoke again. At one point she invoked Ron Weasley from Harry Potter, "So you're going to suffer, but you're going to be happy about it." She emphasized that for the next three or four years they were going to be challenged intellectually, spiritually, and probably relationally and even physically (the hills on the campus were notorious). But she assured them they would be better prepared for life and whatever job they ended with than at the vast majority of colleges.

At the end of the service the new students marched out of the chapel following a man in a Scottish kilt playing bagpipes. They marched around the "quad," as it was called, and then returned to the chapel for their first class photo. More ice cream and refreshments with their parents, and their parents were off.