Campus Notes Ep5: UGA on Belonging You Can't Assign

Janssen, from the University of Georgia's orientation team, pushes back gently on the idea that belonging can be handed to a student.

It's not something staff can declare true by saying the words, he argues — it's personal and individual, built only through a student's own experience, risk-taking, and choices. The team's job is to create the conditions for that to happen, not to announce that it already has.

One UGA: A Spoken-Word Experience, Rewritten Every Year

UGA's clearest expression of that philosophy is 'One UGA,' a spoken-word piece written and performed live by orientation leaders during every orientation session.

It's gone through many versions over the years — some more theatrical, some more direct — but this summer's version, shaped by actually listening to students, leaders, and program alumni, landed harder than most.

Its core message: community takes time, choices, and risk to build, and sometimes it isn't where you expected to find it.

Measuring the Immeasurable

Janssen doesn't pretend belonging shows up cleanly on a dashboard. What he watches for instead are individual moments:

• A student saying a specific story in One UGA resonated with their own situation
• A parent approaching afterward to say their child needed to hear exactly that

Those conversations, more than any metric, tell the team the program is doing its job.

Staying Human at 40,000+ Students

UGA's scale — over 40,000 students, with record enrollment this year — creates a real risk of students feeling like one fish in a big sea.

The team's answer is deliberately small:

• Using names on first contact
• Walking a student to an office instead of pointing at a building
• Getting every detail on orientation name tags right — preferred name, correct hometown — so each student is greeted as a specific person rather than a line item

Janssen credits Guidebook with freeing staff from exactly the kind of logistical overhead, like reprinting materials and one-off information requests, that would otherwise eat into the time available for those human moments.

The Doorstep, Not the Destination

Janssen frames the orientation team's role as the entryway, not the whole journey.

Their contribution shows up later, in retention numbers and student outcomes the team can't fully take credit for, but is glad to have played a small part in.