The shock of the new – freshers week and inductions

Posted on October 1, 2012 Updated on June 12, 2013

It’s freshers’ week. If the dreary October weather and sudden buzz of activity around campus weren’t clues enough, the house plant sale outside the Library building definitely gave the game away.

Freshers’ week means it’s also Library induction week. I don’t think I’m alone in having mixed feelings about inductions. There’s the slight feeling of dread that builds as our teaching calendar gradually fills up during September, until its so full of filled-in lesson blocks that it looks like a badly played game of Tetris. It’s at this stage, in late September, that people start to go a bit Colonel Kurtz

‘The Horror…the…Horror’

However, as soon as the start of term kicks in, and this year’s freshers start rolling through the Library’s doors, the fear turns to determination, which then builds towards a sort of exhausted elation at the end of induction week, dozens of induction sessions and hundreds of students later.

After all, we want to give the new students the best possible introduction to the Library’s services and staff, in the middle of what is a very demanding, disorientating week for them.

It’s also a great chance to show the friendly, welcoming face of the Library, and to plant a few seeds about liaison librarians, e-resources and reference management in the minds of our freshers, before they wander unwittingly into exam and assessment hell in December.

Our inductions are good fun too – where possible our librarians use a treasure hunt style induction, to get teams of new students charging through the Library in search of clues, Dewey numbers and glory.

As a great philosopher almost certainly didn’t say: ‘With glory comes chcoolate’. If you want to see how cut-throat and competitive a bunch of gifted but sleep-deprived 18 year-olds can get, throw a couple of tins of Minature Heroes into the equation.

If minor psychological warfare, sledging, accusations of treachery and plain old cheating aren’t exactly traits you’d want to encourage, they’re certainly a sign that students are engaged and interested in their inductions. All kinds of gamesmanship have cropped up in the treasure hunt inductions over the years.

There’s also been a lot of overwhelmingly positive feedback, generally along the lines of how surprisingly fun and engaging our inductions were, along with equal, if not greater enthusiasm about the amount of  confectionery being handed out.

We also had my all-time favourite comment last year, under the ‘any other comments?’ section of the evaluation form, which was ‘I FAST LIKE TIGER!‘ I don’t know if that person was on the winning team for that particular treasure hunt, but their enthusiasm and competitive edge definitely game across. That or the effects of a deadly cocktail of Quality Street, Red Bull and double espressos.

It’s now T-minus 1 hour to my first Library treasure hunt (I’ll be on the ground floor of the Central Library, directing traffic and dodging trick questions from competing students about the whereabouts of our self issue machines) and I’m passing through the familiar phase where thoughts of ‘the horror’ subside, and turn to determination, and the belief that myself and the other Library staff can be heroes, at least for one week. It’s the least the hordes of bright, tired and slightly bewildered students coming through our doors for the first time deserve.