It’s no secret to any first-year student here at CWU that the required University 101 course in the 2023 fall quarter was something akin to a trainwreck. At CWU, along with all of your other classes in your first fall quarter, every student is required to take University 101. 

The purpose of this single-credit class is supposedly to prepare students for the rest of college and to introduce them to standards, policies and campus resources in a more expansive way than simply attending Week of Welcome. Or so I’ve heard because this year’s incoming class experienced something a little different.

In past years, University 101 has been a physical, in-person class that students take, to learn the basics of college life. It’s never been perfect, no class ever really is, so this year it seems that CWU decided to go a different direction with it. Instead of taking a class, students were instructed to download the Suitable app on their phone, attend Week of Welcome and follow the canvas page. Easy enough, right? Attend an event that you had to anyway, scan a barcode and get it over with. And for the most part, that’s all it was, at least for the first week. Sure, there was always a technical issue here or there, and yeah, maybe some of the events felt a bit boring or redundant, but what else was there to do? Problems started at the same time that general classes began.

Aside from Week of Welcome, the main part of University 101 was attending events on your own time. We had to attend workshops for general education and academic planning, as well as twelve other events, three in each category of stewardship, belonging, engagement and student success. These were normal campus activities, things you’d find in the Hype booklets, and you had to go in at the beginning of the quarter and mark down on a Google form which activity you would be doing for each category.

But being outside events run by different organizations across campus and not by our (in nothing but name) professor, events were all at different times, different places, and of course, subject to change or cancellation. In my first quarter, my classes were all in the afternoon, and then I worked almost every day in the evening. This meant that even after I planned each event around my class schedule, let my boss know what days I couldn’t work for the entire quarter and made sure to get all of my events lined up in my calendar, things still went wrong. 

Class is hard enough in your first quarter of college when you don’t have a professor sending you to events that got canceled without any notification, and then blaming you for not knowing to check a site that you were never provided for updates. And yet, that is exactly what happened to many students throughout the quarter.

I think the idea was fun, alright? Getting students to come together across campus, giving us an excuse and a reason to socialize outside of classes and make new friends. But it becomes an unreasonable request when the required events are completely out of the instructor’s control and, quite frankly, completely unrelated to any real learning. Students who have to work their way through college should not fear that they are going to fail a required class because they cannot make it to eat cookies with police officers or play video games in the SURC. Students should not have to skip their real classes to attend these events. 

I do not feel like I learned anything from this year’s University 101 class, making it a waste of time and money that quite frankly I do not have. I hope that next year’s incoming class can get more out of it than we did.