By Sophia Lin and Humphrey Zhao
As more and more students worldwide apply for American schools, it is inevitable for schools like SAS to receive more new students. This raises the question of whether or not the quality of SAS’s new student integration process is on par with the education it intends to provide. If the integration process fails its intention, the educational quality for new students declines alongside. For these reasons, we set out to investigate the quality of SAS’s integration process and provide an insight into how new students think this process can be improved.
For the past few years, SAS has followed a specific procedure when integrating new students. First come orientation day, which is all about making students feel welcomed and ready to set off on this new journey towards adulthood. Students are assigned Link Crew leaders who lead fun activities and help get them accustomed to the high school campus and fellow peers, and as Jianing Zhou (rising freshman) states, “[the ice-breaker activities led by the Link Crew Leaders] were pretty fun, and we all got to know each other better”, they were pretty successful. However, while this excitement is shared by all SAS students, orientation day for new students can also be stressful and tedious. New students need to get accustomed to the campus and school technology in a short amount of time, and while returning students get to excitedly greet their friends and chat about what they look forward to in high school, the buzz of the crowd only reinforces the fear in new students that SAS is already an established community, and they’re outsiders intruding on it. This fear sometimes becomes the reality of SAS students, but fortunately, this population remains few and far between, and SAS continues to be a very welcoming community. Regardless, there are multiple initiatives SAS can take to help new students feel more comfortable and at home in this new environment.
Our school does a great job at integrating new students and maintaining a comfortable, inclusive, and friendly environment as David Kuo (new sophomore) shares, “I was able to make a lot of friends who were willingly to show him around very quickly and easily integrate into the SAS community.” This sentiment of SAS turning out to be much friendlier than they had anticipated is shared among a lot of our interviewees. Furthermore, interviewees have stated how some SAS students have reached out prior to the official start of school to get to know about their impressions of SAS. These actions have made new students feel much more welcomed and included, and less tense and lonely on the first few days of school because they feel like they have someone they can reach out to.
Another way to solve this ‘friend’ problem associated with switching schools is by including more new students per classroom. As Ethan Jin (a new freshman) had stated, “on average, there are only around 2-3 new students per classroom for 9th graders”, this number is even fewer for higher grade levels. In addition to a lack of new student per class, assigned seating also heavily limit interactions among new students. But this is a bad situation as being new makes students more prone to reaching out and making new friends, and this task becomes easier when there are other students who do not already belong to pre-established friend groups. By putting more new students into one class, these students can feel less alone and more understood, and, as a result, find making friends easier. Understandably, such a system is hard to implement with the many different courses SAS presents for selection that cause frequent schedule conflicts amongst new students; however, having more new students per classroom is really beneficial in helping integrate new students. Hence, SAS should look into this further.
Despite the welcoming atmosphere of SAS, some barriers prevent new students from feeling Despite the welcoming atmosphere of SAS, some barriers prevent new students from feeling completely at home at SAS, the first of which is the size of the campus. Multiple interviewees have reported difficulty in finding classrooms with Jianing Zhou stating that it took her “about a month to really know where all [her] classes were.” Such a situation and barrier to feeling fully at home can be easily solved through the creation of a more detailed map. While SAS does hand out a general map of where the H and L wings are (which over 80% of our interviewees never actually received), this map fails to show where specific classrooms are as Ethan Jin, the only one of our interviewees that appeared to have actually received the map, explains, and where important meeting centers like the PAC and LLH are, etc. At the very least, the general maps SAS provide should include roughly where the English, Social Studies, Chinese —etc.— halls are. Yet that isn’t the case. The current maps given to new students should be more detailed and also be made digitized to increase accessibility and be of more use to new students.
Moreover, orientation does not provide new students with the appropriate amount of knowledge to navigate all the resources at SAS — such as using Powerschool to sign up for ASAs and accessing printers. Getting new students familiar with the application process for ASAs is very important because they are enriching activities that begin very early on in the school year, and if new students want the full experience, they need to enter early. However, most of our interviewees reports not receiving any instructions on how to sign up for ASAs, with both Jialei Zhang and David Kuo explaining that they had to ask around and were only able to sign up for ASAs with the help of classmates. Furthermore, just like how Jialei Zhang (a new sophomore) explains that “[she] was not given instructions on how to print”, there is a lot of confusion around operating printers due to a lack of detailed instructions being provided. A solution to this situation is by publishing a detailed instruction sheet on how to connect to, and use, printers. According to our interviews, the majority of problems appear to stem from not knowing how to charge money for printing, how to connect to printers, and where to print, all of which could be solved with a detailed instruction sheet and, again, a new map that includes the locations of the Apple Center and printers. Even if new students know all of the above, they often still face technological issues involving their ID cards’ inability to print, something that deserves more investigation into. Lastly, our interviews suggest that there is a fair amount of confusion surrounding Flexis; new students tend to initially not know what’s going on during a specific Flexi, nor do they know how to find out about it. A possible solution to this problem is by adding what activities are during each Flexi to Powerschool and publicizing a schedule a few weeks beforehand of the succeeding month, marking all the important meetings.
In conclusion, SAS provides a very friendly, inclusive, and comfortable learning environment for all students. The student body also carries these positive qualities, and new students feel very welcomed in general. Despite this, interviews with new students have revealed that the integration process has several deficiencies surrounding information-distribution and technology. These grievances can easily be combated by creating a new digital map and instruction sheets for processes like printing and signing up for ASAs. Lastly, SAS can help make new students feel more included by putting more new students per class, which can make the process of making friends easier (an important part of integrating new students). But overall, new students cite unforeseen inclusiveness and smooth integration into pre-established friend groups as the most significant part of their SAS experience. We’re proud to be part of this inclusive community and would like to help improve SAS’s new student integration process.