Title: Freshmen Retreat
General Information about Item:
- Customary folklore: rituals, traditions
- Language: English
- Country where Item is from: USA
Informant Data:
- Trevor Davis is an ’18 that joined X.ado his freshman year and sang in his high school choir for three years. He is 21 years old. He was born in Wheaton, Illinois. He grew up and still lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is majoring in computer science, and minoring in math and anthropology.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
All members of X.ado participate in this ritual. It usually occurs early in the fall term after new member have been chosen. This tradition has existed for as long as the informant can remember and he first experienced it when he joined the team.
- Cultural Context
X.ado wants to include the freshmen into the group, and this exercise lets the new members get comfortable, and serves to further integrate them into the group. It teaches them about the group and influences them with the group’s culture. It’s sort of like a cultural boot camp for the new members. This ritual reflects the group’s attempt to create an inclusive culture.
Item:
X.ado brings their freshmen to a new member retreat. Freshmen introduce themselves to the group, exchange funny stories such as old love stories, and play icebreaker games to get to know the other new members and returning members.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Transcript of Associated File:
“There are some things that we always do with our new members. One is right off the bat, we like to wake them up to welcome them into the group with a song that we sing every year in X.ado called ‘The Lord Bless You’. We come to their door, early in the morning after we’ve decided to take them into the group. We wake them up and sing to them, and then we go out to a diner and have our first breakfast with them. Everyone’s tired, but you know, you’re bonding and really exicted that you have these new members. We also have a freshman retreat, and we do things like ‘get to you know’, and ‘hot seat’, and get stories from the new members like they always tell us their history and love stories and stuff like that. It’s always really entertaining and just funny ways to get to know the new members, and kind of break the ice, off the bat.”
Informant’s Comments:
- See transcript
Collector’s Comments:
This is something that other groups on campus do as well. At Dartmouth, doing little retreats like this makes sense, because people are typically very busy, and if they didn’t schedule an event like this, then no one would have time to sit down with each other and meet each other.
Collector’s Name: Marcus Reid
Compiled/Analyzed by: Afnan Enayet/Sruthi Pasupuleti
Tags/Keywords:
- Acapella
- Retreat
- Initiation
- Freshmen
- New member