Five colleges. Multiple degree programs, admission pathways, and student populations. One orientation coordinator building the entire digital experience.

That's Deric Ford's reality. As Associate Director of Orientation and Transition Experience at The New School in New York City, Deric is responsible for onboarding students across five distinct schools into one coherent orientation program. The institution is known for progressive thinking: Parsons School of Design sits under the same umbrella as schools of performing arts, social research, liberal arts, and jazz. Their students arrive with radically different needs.

Here's how Deric manages 30+ personalized orientation schedules without a technical background, a large team, or a rebuild every semester.

When the schedule lives on a webpage, students get lost

Before Guidebook, The New School's orientation schedules lived on a website. Students were expected to navigate to the page, find their college, locate their program, and figure out where they needed to be.

In theory, that works. In practice, students showed up holding printouts from the webpage and asked staff the same question over and over: "My schedule says 3:15 in this building. Is this correct?"

Deric describes it plainly: students simply didn't know where they needed to be. The question got repeated enough that it became the signal. The old system wasn't failing because it was poorly designed. It was failing because it was built for a simpler institution than the one trying to use it.

Five schools with overlapping degree programs, undeclared students with no major to map to a session, and rolling admissions adding new students right up to orientation day. A static webpage couldn't hold all of that without losing people.

The feature that changed everything

Deric joined The New School about two years before he brought Guidebook in. He knew the problem existed from day one. What stopped him from solving it sooner wasn't reluctance. It was time.

His team at the time owned both orientation and commencement. Orientation ran in August, family weekend followed in October, spring orientation in January, then commencement planning from February through May. There was no window. By the time one event ended, the next one was already close.

When his team split responsibilities and he moved to orientation exclusively, he finally had the breathing room to act. He did his due diligence, compared options, and made the call: the feature that decided it was custom schedules.

"The custom schedule is the defining moment for us," Deric said in a Guidebook webinar. "The current experience was that students had to go on to this website to find their college and to find their program. But in Guidebook, from day one when they loaded into the experience, it provided their schedule for them."

That shift (from students hunting for their schedule to their schedule finding them) is what the whole build is in service of.

What is a custom orientation schedule?

A custom orientation schedule is a personalized view of orientation events assigned directly to an individual student based on their college, program, or student type. Rather than showing every student the full session list and asking them to filter it themselves, a custom schedule surfaces only the sessions relevant to that student the moment they open the app. For institutions running orientation across multiple colleges or student populations, custom schedules eliminate the confusion that comes from a one-size-fits-all agenda.

Why the previous tool couldn't keep up

Before committing to Guidebook, Deric evaluated Splash, a tool his institution was already using through a partnership. Splash works well for one or two discrete events. You set up a page, list your sessions, and attendees scroll through.

The problem at The New School is that equitable experience is a stated institutional value. The provost's office wanted every school's students to have the same quality of experience, the same visual consistency, the same access to information. Splash made that difficult. Its page-based format meant each college's orientation could look and feel different depending on who built it. And critically, Splash couldn't assign a unique schedule to a specific student.

Guidebook could. A student logs in and sees exactly what they need. Nothing more, nothing less.

The workflow: 30+ schedules, built by one person

The scale sounds unwieldy: 30 to 40 custom schedules representing every variation of student type across five colleges. In practice, Deric built it by breaking the problem into pieces.

Start with the student attributes. When uploading students into Guidebook, Deric tagged each one with every relevant attribute: undergraduate, graduate, first-generation, international, veteran, and more. Those tags are what make the custom schedule assignment possible downstream.

Map schedule to student type. Each of the 30+ schedules represents a distinct population: a nursing student in the health sciences college has different required sessions than an undeclared student or a transfer student in Parsons. The schedule does the sorting so the student doesn't have to.

Launch in spring, not fall. This is Deric's strongest piece of advice. The spring orientation cohort is smaller. Stakes are lower. Build the bare bones there, test what the core experience looks like, and refine before the larger fall intake arrives. Trying to build and launch something this layered for the first time in August (when enrollment is higher and everything is happening at once) is how you create unnecessary pressure for yourself.

Treat session content as evergreen. The biggest time cost in building a personalized orientation app isn't the tool. It's the content: meeting with every stakeholder from every college who runs a session, understanding which students need to attend it, and getting the session details right. Deric's solution is to make that work compound over time rather than repeat. He asks every stakeholder to keep their session title and description consistent from orientation to orientation. If nothing has fundamentally changed, they're done before they start. The sessions are already in the system. The schedule reuses them automatically.

"Are you doing the same sessions that you did last time?" Deric describes asking stakeholders. "If you are, great. Do you want to do any updates? If not, great. You're done."

That shift in how stakeholders relate to orientation content is what makes the model sustainable for a team of one.

The lesson from the fall rebuild

The fall after the spring pilot, Deric ran into a specific edge case worth knowing about.

The New School uses rolling admissions. Students kept being added right up to orientation day. Some of them didn't have assigned schedules yet, having come in through the admissions pipeline after the initial upload. Deric's team assigned those students to schedules on the fly, on-site.

The problem: every time a schedule was published after a new assignment, it triggered a system-wide refresh. Students who already had their schedules would suddenly find them gone. Staff were assigning new schedules every few minutes. Each assignment caused another refresh. For about thirty minutes, schedules were appearing and disappearing for students across the whole cohort.

The fix is simple once you know it: assign all schedules in batches ahead of time, and don't publish schedule updates during the peak moments of orientation day itself. The rolling admissions edge case is real, but it's manageable with a pre-orientation batch assignment process rather than on-the-fly adjustments mid-event.

What changed for students

After the spring launch, something stopped.

Students stopped asking whether their schedule was correct. The question that had defined orientation staff interactions across every previous session simply didn't come up. The only navigation question that remained was where a specific building was located.

Deric's colleagues across the institution noticed the shift too. Students arrived at orientation feeling more informed. They knew what was expected of them. They had ownership of where they were going and when, not because anyone told them to, but because the app showed them exactly what was theirs from the moment they opened it.

Less confusion. More belonging.

That's what a custom schedule actually does. Not just logistical clarity (though it delivers that), but the early signal to a new student that this institution knows who they are.

Advice for coordinators running multiple session formats

If you're running orientation across multiple session formats, colleges, or student populations and you're still on a static webpage or a single shared agenda, here's what Deric's experience points to:

• Don't wait for the fall to build. Spring is your pilot. Smaller cohort, lower stakes, room to learn.
• The tool is not the hard part. Content is. Spend your energy getting stakeholders to think about their sessions as evergreen assets, not annual rebuilds.
• Assign schedules before orientation day. Whatever your admissions pipeline looks like, build in a batch assignment step so you're not publishing updates in real time when students are standing in front of you.
• The 30+ schedules look intimidating from the outside. Inside the system, each one is a mapped population with a set of tagged sessions. The complexity is real, but it's organized complexity.

Deric's full story is on the Guidebook blog. For a closer look at how custom schedules work across multiple colleges, the orientation app for new student programs page is a good place to start, or book a demo and we'll walk through it with you.

[faq]

Q: How do you manage orientation schedules for multiple colleges?

A: The most effective approach is to tag each student on upload with every relevant attribute (college, program, student type) and then build a custom schedule for each distinct population. Thirty to forty schedules sounds like a lot, but each one is just a mapped set of tagged sessions. Students log in and see only what applies to them. The key to keeping it manageable is treating session content as evergreen: if a session title and description haven't changed from the previous year, it's already done.

Q: What is a custom orientation schedule in Guidebook?

A: A custom schedule is a personalized view of orientation sessions assigned to an individual student based on their attributes (college, program, year, student type, and so on). Rather than showing every student the full session list, a custom schedule surfaces only the sessions relevant to that specific person from the moment they open the app. For institutions running orientation across multiple colleges or student populations, this removes the navigation burden from students entirely.

Q: Can one person build and manage a multi-college orientation app?

A: Yes. Deric Ford, Associate Director of Orientation and Transition Experience at The New School, built and manages a Guidebook app serving five colleges with 30 to 40 custom schedules. He has no technical background. The biggest time investment is content (meeting with stakeholders to get sessions right), not the tool itself. His advice: if you can get stakeholders to keep session titles and descriptions consistent from year to year, the rebuild time drops dramatically.

Q: How long does it take to build an orientation app in Guidebook?

A: It depends on how much personalization you want. A standard experience with a shared session list takes significantly less time than a highly personalized one with custom schedules for each student population. The design work (matching your institution's colors, branding, and visual identity) adds time too. Deric's recommendation is to treat it as a slow build, not a sprint. Launch a bare-bones version for a smaller spring cohort first, refine it, and go deeper for the fall.

Q: What's the difference between tracks and custom schedules in Guidebook?

A: Tracks let students opt into a filtered view of sessions that match a particular interest or identity. They choose which track to follow, and the schedule adjusts accordingly. Custom schedules are assigned by the builder: a student logs in and their schedule is already set for them, with no filtering required. For orientation programs where session attendance is required and varies by college or program, custom schedules remove the decision entirely. Tracks work well for elective or interest-based sessions on top of a core schedule.

Q: How do you handle last-minute schedule changes during orientation?

A: The most important lesson is to avoid publishing schedule updates at peak moments of orientation day. For institutions with rolling admissions, students added late to the system may not yet have assigned schedules, and assigning and publishing schedules on the fly triggers a system-wide refresh that temporarily clears everyone's schedule. The fix is a batch assignment process before orientation begins, so no schedule assignments need to happen once students are on campus and actively using the app.

[/faq]