Campus Notes Ep6: Touch the Door

Natasha, Associate Director of Student Transition and Engagement at Coastal Carolina, argues that belonging is only half about people.

The other half is spatial: students who cannot confidently navigate their campus or their new town will not feel at home in it, no matter how many social events they attend. Programming, in her view, has to hit both at once.

Belonging Is Social and Spatial

Many of Coastal's students fly in from far away, and for some it is their first time living in South Carolina or the South at all. So the team plans for two outcomes simultaneously:

• Lasting relationships with peers, faculty, and staff
• Comfort navigating campus and the surrounding Conway area — finding the spots they will come back to

Measuring It in the Moment, Not in a Survey

Natasha is direct that belonging resists being broken into survey questions. What the team does instead is talk to students during events — what brought you out, have you been to one of ours before — and treat word of mouth as data.

They also run interactive sticker surveys: a few questions on a board, students place a sticker for how they are feeling right then. Results are visible instantly, and she thinks the answers are more honest than anything collected afterward.

Teal Nation Welcome and the Touch-the-Door Rule

Teal Nation Welcome is Coastal's welcome week, run twice a year — fall and spring — for incoming and returning students, on a full seven-day schedule.

The schedule is built by anticipating questions the team already heard all summer during orientation. The clearest example is the 'find your classes' tours:

• Students reconnect with their orientation leaders after move-in
• They walk their actual course schedule to the actual classrooms
• A touch-the-door rule: students physically touch the door of the room and hear 'this is where you'll be on Wednesday at one'

The point is removing a specific, avoidable stressor before the first day of class.

Iterating a Signature Event Instead of Repeating It

Last year's pilot was a western-themed evening event called Western Throwdown, scheduled for the Monday before a Wednesday start, deliberately designed to give students a fun, safe on-campus alternative to going out. Attendance was strong.

This year the team kept the structure and changed the theme to a Y2K beach concept that fits Coastal better. Food and giveaways stayed. Hundreds of students turned out on a lawn ringed by freshman residence halls — chosen because it is easy to walk to.

The App Worked Because Staff Used It First

The shift Natasha noticed this year was not student behavior but staff behavior. Orientation leader training explicitly framed the Guidebook app as a tool for the leaders themselves, not just for families and students.

The instruction was to answer a student's question and then show them where to find the answer next time — the schedule, the maps, the Exploring Coastal fair listings. Students bought in because they watched staff using it, which she contrasts with previous years and with the usual reaction to being told to download another app.

The Real Measure of Success

What Natasha wants students to remember a year later is not the programming. It is a person.

Students coming back to tell her they met their best friend at one of last year's welcome week events is, she says, the outcome that matters — one connection early enough to change the whole college experience.