Trinity College

First-Year Students, IDP Students, and Transfers to Join Upperclassmen

HARTFORD, Conn. – The 2009-2010 academic year will get underway Thursday, September 3, when roughly 575 first-year students and their families will arrive on campus. The highlight of the day will be the convocation address delivered by President James F. Jones, Jr., marking the opening of the College’s 186th year.

Sophomores, juniors and seniors will start moving in on Saturday, September 5, and classes will begin three days later.

Check-in for members of the Class of 2013 will be from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the second floor of Mather Hall. That will be followed by a buffet luncheon for the new students and their families from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Although the number of first-year students is down slightly from a year ago, First-Year Dean Margaret Lindsey said the number is “right on target” and demonstrates that Trinity is “holding its own” in terms of enrollment. Having 575 incoming students ensures that “everything is going to run smoothly,” she said.

Jones’ convocation address, “Thoreau’s Toolbox for Your One Season of Youth,” will not only welcome the new students to Trinity, but also discuss both the opportunities and challenges that await them. Jones will speak at approximately 2:30 p.m. on the main quadrangle.

Following the speech and departure of family members, the first-year students will have residence hall meetings, a barbeque and time to get acquainted.

Friday will feature seminars, meetings with faculty members, individual advising sessions, and language placement exams. A featured event is the Matriculation Ceremony during which all first-year students, IDP students, and transfers will take the Matriculation Oath that enables them to become official members of Trinity College. The ceremony, which is the oldest continuously observed tradition here, will take place at 10:30 a.m. in the Chapel. The Matriculation Oath requires that students sign a declaration promising compliance with the College’s laws and regulations governing personal conduct and academics.

The First-Year Reading Initiative will be led by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She will address the campus community on Friday at 4 p.m. at the Koeppel Community Sports Center on New Britain Avenue.

Kolbert traveled from Alaska to Greenland in writing her book about global warming, which was originally a three-part series in The New Yorker, and which won the 2005 National Magazine Award in the Public Interest category. The book brings the environment into the consciousness of Americans and asks what, if anything, can be done to save the planet.

Kolbert will return in four years as the speaker at the Commencement Ceremony of the Class of 2013.

Unlike some years, students will not be greeted upon their arrival on campus by any massive new building projects. However, one of the summer’s major projects was the completion of the residence hall wireless networking initiative. All residence hall spaces have been fully provided with high-speed wireless networking. Individual rooms will also continue to have access to wired connections for students without WI-FI enabled devices. Also, more areas in Mather Hall, the Long Walk and the Life Sciences quadrangles will be WI-FI enabled.

In addition, the Internet bandwidth has been increased to speed and improve network performance.

Dormitory telephone services also have changed. The “in-room” residence-hall phones have been replaced with a new messaging system that allows calls placed to students to either be connected directly to their cell phones or routed as an attachment to their email account.

There have also been classroom renovations and upgrades, including:
• The computer labs in the Library has been upgraded to dual boot iMacs;
• Most lecture halls and seminar rooms have had their instructor workstation upgraded to a dual boot Mac mini;
• Most seminar rooms that did not previously have a workstation have had a dual boot Mac mini installed;
• There is a new MIDI lab to support music composition AAC 104; and
• Many other classrooms have had their audio-visual setup and/or workstation area reconfigured to better address instructional needs.