O-Week (dot rice dot edu), we hardly knew ye
Well, the website for Rice’s undergraduate orientation week has finally undergone a total redesign (probably a result of a new upper echelon at the university, including a new Dean of Undergraduates). Verdict: blah.
The front page is slick and impersonal, and the undergraduate information is buried under a haystack of JavaScript menus. Not particularly engaging. The copy is new, too:
The mission of O-Week is to assist new students in the transition to academic and social life at Rice University, with the two primary functions being: to provide academic advising and to introduce and incorporate new students into their residential colleges. Informative presentations, small-group discussions, academic advising, and class registration are designed to help you enter the university informed and confident about your upcoming years at Rice.
YAWN. Sorry for the snoozer, Class of 2010.
Of course, I’m partial to the version I designed for O*Week 1998, whose design (roughly) and text (exactly) survived two redesigns and seven years.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
These people are all dressed the same, and they know who I am, and they’re telling me I’m going to be LIVING in their building!
These people are crazy! Get me out of here!
WHOA, THERE
Now calm down. These people have been planning for months, and they’ve been working without sleep for days, doing nothing but preparing for your arrival.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t really vouch for their sanity.
But these are your advisors — a team of several older Rice students who have sworn to spare you from the dull sort of orientation you would have been subjected to at another school. You simply can’t adjust to an intense new atmosphere by sitting in 2,000-seat lecture halls with people you may never see again, listening to boring lectures by faculty you’ll never meet.
To put it another way (taken from the Will Rice College 1998 O-Week book): “You may be nervous, sweaty, and even scared, but we guarantee that you will remember your O-Week.”
OK, are you with me now? Good.
Welcome to O-Week.
I was always pretty proud of that legacy, and it’s sad to see it go. Oh, well; times change, and websites move on.
[On the other hand, the photos that they’re using on the new O-Week website do appear to be from the late 90s…]
Update: What, no information for transfer students on the new site?
Update 2: Yeah, yeah, the new site has all kinds of handy information that the 1998 version lacked. (This is partially because in eight years a lot has been done to put handy university information online.) So I guess I give the new site points for being somewhat more useful than previous versions. But it’s definitely not as much fun.