By Christian Schloemer
Contributer
A group of students relaxing and participating in arts and crafts
The office of Orientation, Transition and Family Engagement has started a new initiative.
This academic year called Owl Links, meant to bring together new students with similar interests.
Sal Rizza, the director of Orientation, Transition and Family Engagement, was one of the key players that helped to put this program together along with Graduate Intern Kyra Catubig.
“We wanted to create opportunities where students could meet people,” Rizza said, “make friends with interests that are similar to the ones they currently have.”
According to the Owl Link catalog, the program has 22 different Owl Link programs, each with its own student leader facilitating the group and lasting anywhere between four to six weeks.
Catubig was tasked with overseeing the program, and she was met with various challenges for getting the program off the ground.
Catubig said the turnaround time was “really quick” when starting this program.
“A lot of the Owl Link leaders are current student leaders, and many of them at the time were in training, so it was very difficult to get consistent participation,” Catubig said.
The student leaders brought up their own ideas for topics in each of the groups they would run, including Roblox, anime and hiking.
One of the students leading a group was psychology major Catherine Vu, a sophomore, who ran the Owl Link “Craft Corner” Thursdays from 1-3 p.m. in the Adanti Student Center in Room 309.
“We’ve done origami, scrapbooking, script stickers, clay,” Vu said.
Vu also said that she had a hard time promoting her Owl Link and getting people to come to meetings.
“When it first started, I don’t think they advertised very well,” Vu said. “Then, it slowly started going around, and in the end, people started going.”
One first-year student that attended the Craft Corner Owl Link was elementary education major Faith Lally, a freshman, who like Vu mentioned found out about the program very late.
“I saw it on the student center TV, and it said there was a crafting corner,” Lally said. “I also kind of heard about it when we were in orientation, and I kept it in the back of my mind.”
Lally says she enjoyed the people and liked “chilling and making stuff.”
Feedback such as Lally’s is crucial for Rizza and Catubig, who are looking to improve on the first year of the program.
“This is year one; we learned a lot,” Rizza said. “Year two, we’re going to refine and see where this takes us.”
Rizza and Catubig both agree that overall, they are satisfied with how the first year went.
“If students- one, two, seven, I don’t know- felt like that were able to feel happy and feel they are a part of Southern, then there’s some success in that,” Rizza said.
