At Stony Brook University, it is required that all freshman students, in order to receive credit for their freshman seminar class, go to academic or social events sponsored by Stony Brook University and approved by whatever quad they were assigned to before the year started.
In order to get credit for the freshman seminar class, which is only one credit, you have to attend at least one social event, like homecoming, or an academic event, which will deal with a certain topic that is discussed thoroughly, as the name implies.
However, these events, just like the class of freshman seminar, are absolutely pointless; they are only an inconvenience to the students that have to attend them. Most students only go to these events because they are required to go in order to get credit for a class that “helps you get accustomed to college” and tries to make the large campus of Stony Brook feel much smaller than it is.
The one flaw, out of many, about this idea is that the class meets once a week for one hour. Besides the fact that it does not give time for students to really connect with one another, it just really serves as an inconvenience when making school schedules. When my instructor for my second semester freshman seminar class asked why we, the students, were in this class, a majority said that they were in it because it fit their schedule. I was one of them, picking that specific class because I am a commuter student and I did not want to have to hang around Stony Brook waiting for my class.
On top of that, Stony Brook has a large amount of commuter students. This makes these events just pointless; it serves to be an inconvenience in our schedules because most of these events take place at night time or on the weekend. Why would students who commute from the city, for instance, want to sit around and wait for a social event in which they will sit around and do nothing, being there only because a pointless class requires them to be there?
I understand that the university wants to help freshmen acclimate to the campus, but we all knew what we signed up for when we decided that we wanted to go to Stony Brook. We all heard stories of the massive lectures, the weed-out science courses and the like, but at the end of the day we chose to come here for one reason or another. The large campus aspect was something we already knew in advance. Take out these pointless events and, for that matter, the freshman seminar class, because honestly it only serves to be an inconvenience to a majority of the students that go to the university.
