MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE ORIENTATION PROGRAM LINKS STUDENTS TO LARGER COMMUNITY

For immediate release
September 12, 2001

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE ORIENTATION PROGRAM LINKS STUDENTS TO LARGER COMMUNITY

Nearly three dozen activities await participants in the College's Second*Saturday program.

SOUTH HADLEY, Massachusetts—Some will help prepare for the opening of the Berkshire Hills Music Academy, a new residential school that uses music studies to help its students overcome learning challenges. Others will help with the harvest at the Food Bank Farm, go rollerblading on the Norwottuck Rail Trail, perform trail work at Quabbin Reservoir, or spruce up a community playground in Holyoke.

Whatever their destination, new students at Mount Holyoke College will get a taste of what opportunities lie beyond the College's gates on Saturday, Sept. 15, as participants in the College's Second*Saturday program.

Three hundred and fifty new students, joined by 55 upper-class student leaders, will enjoy a range of community service and recreational activities up and down the Pioneer Valley. Each of the 34 activities is designed to encourage the students to connect with their new community.

"We want students to get involved in things that will be meaningful and satisfying to them," says Catharine Melhorn, Hammond-Douglass Professor of Music and the faculty coordinator for Second*Saturday. The program takes its name from the fact that it occurs on the second Saturday of the fall semester.

The program began last year, as part of the College's efforts to provide a happy college initiation for first-year students, foreign fellows, and Frances Perkins Scholars, the College's students of non-traditional age. Sites were proposed by faculty, staff and alumnae. According to Melhorn, 97 percent of the 285 first-year students who took part in last year's 30 projects reported a "totally enthusiastic response."

On Sept. 15, a fleet of vans, buses and cars will bring students to locations as near as South Hadley and as distant as the Berkshire County town of Stockbridge. Projects begin at 9 AM, and conclude by 3 PM. The largest of the activities, a day of apple picking and baking, will involve 34 students, while the smallest, exercising the animals at the Dakin Animal Shelter, will involve seven.

The theme of the 2001 orientation program is Women Leading Leading Women.

Home | MyMHC | Web Email | Directories | SiteMap | Search | Help
Admission | Academics | Campus Life | Athletics
Library & Technology | About the College | Alumnae | News & Events | Offices & Services
Copyright © 2001 Mount Holyoke College. This page created by the Office of Communications and maintained by dwright. Last modified on September 13, 2001.