By Laura Acuff, Student Reporter
More than 50 applicants were expected to turn in Welcome Week peer leader applications Wednesday for the 49 student leader positions available for next fall.
Welcome Week steering committee applications are due Wednesday, and mentor leader applications must be submitted by April 10.
“We’re blessed with just a great group of motivated students who volunteer every year,” said Dr. Eric Gumm, director of orientations and assistant director the First-Year Program. “We usually have 250 to upwards of around 300. They do it because they want to welcome students and help them start well. We’re really blessed to have that at ACU.”
Peer leaders receive a $300 stipend to work with freshman university seminar groups during Welcome Week and then throughout the fall semester, teaching and mentoring, Gumm said. Mentor leaders primarily help lead university seminar groups during Welcome Week for service-learning hours. Steering committee positions, also strictly volunteer, consist of upperclassmen who guide many behind-the-scenes aspects of Welcome Week.
The prospect of free food and moving into residence halls early offers additional incentive for volunteers, said Marc Mace, sophomore mathematics major from Fort Worth, who served as a mentor leader for a mathematics university seminar group at last year’s Welcome Week and plans to serve as peer leader for the same group next fall. However, most motivation should stem from just wanting to help out the incoming freshmen.
“You have to be patient,” Mace said. “It’s tough because you want all your freshmen that are in your U-100 group to be there at every single thing, but then you realize when you were a freshman, Welcome Week was probably the most exhausting time of your entire life, because everything is planned, and they want you to go to everything, and you’re totally drained. So if you want to have a good time and you want to help freshmen learn about ACU, that way they don’t come on campus as the na’ve freshman, then, yes, it is a great thing. But if you have any other motivation, though I don’t know what that would be, then I wouldn’t do it. It’s definitely an awesome way to help out.”
Colleen Ashley, freshman political science major from American Samoa, plans to apply to be a mentor leader for this year’s Welcome Week and said she was first inspired to return by the dramatic entrance into Moody Coliseum on the first day of her own Welcome Week, provided by peer and mentor leaders dressed in costume and cheering for the incoming freshmen.
“My mentor group leaders were important in my first experiences here at ACU because Welcome Week was just such a new experience, almost kind of a shock to the system, because it was suddenly college, and everything was new, and without those mentor leaders, for me, I would have been lost
and going crazy,” Ashley said. “I guess I would like to supply that same sanity to all the other poor little incoming freshmen who don’t know what they’re doing.”
