For new students who feel adrift in the sea of campus, they may find relief in the form of a new guide created by a student who has made it his business to help students find their way.
Daniel Winegard, a senior majoring in anthropology and a resident assistant in Hillside Community, sought to create a single document that organizes all basic must-know information for students.
The document, the Scholar’s Guide for Everyone, originated as a single Microsoft Word file in which Winegard accumulated various schedules, contacts and other pieces of information he wanted to reference easily.
“I wanted to condense everything that helped me out into one single sheet of paper,” Winegard said.
Keeping the document short was critical to Winegard. As an orientation adviser in the summer of 2008, he found himself burdened with too many packets of unorganized information to efficiently offer guidance to new students.
The guide became a more serious endeavor when he expanded it into an 18-page file to fulfill a requirement for a Binghamton University Scholars Program course, SCHL 227: Leadership & Project Management.
“The Scholar’s Guide is just my take on the University’s information. Everything in it is readily available on each part of [www.binghamton.edu]. Any first-year student could benefit from more coherent information,” Winegard said.
Jeffrey Horowitz, the assistant director of Dickinson Community, said he believes BU’s size can hinder communication between students and offices that are meant to be resources for them.
“Location on campus can really limit resources. If an office is hard to find, it’s less likely to be found,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz said the resource he most often directs students to are the online campus map and the Career Development Center. He also stressed the importance of residential assistants in college environments because of the natural “good neighbor” aspect of residence halls.
“Students always go to their RA first whenever they have a question,” he said.
Winegard said he has no plans for any one person or department to inherit the job of updating the Scholar’s Guide once he graduates.
Although the only offices to utilize the guide so far have been the anthropology department and transfer student office within admissions, he has offered the document to each Harpur College department and the Binghamton Scholars Program.
“The document is fully editable as anyone sees fit,” Winegard said, but he also believes that most information in it will remain relevant indefinitely. He cited the study strategies and how to succeed sections of the guide as examples of information that will survive time.
The Scholar’s Guide for Everyone is available online at www.divshare.com/download/launch/13940191-422. Students majoring in anthropology can view it on the Blackboard website under the organization heading “Undergraduate Anthropology at BU.” Winegard expects more Harpur departments and the Scholars Program websites to make use of the guide within the next year.