Welcome to Oneonta: College students start to arrive

Aug. 23—The college students are coming back this week to SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.

Both schools began welcoming residential students on Wednesday.

SUNY Oneonta will have 1,292 first-year students, according to information provided by the school.

On Wednesday, Aug. 23, 501 of those students moved into Littell, Wilber, Hulbert and Grant residence halls in the morning and Tobey, Golding, Ford and Denison residence halls in the afternoon. On Thursday, 791 students are expected to move into the same halls.

The new first-year students arrived Wednesday with parents, siblings and alumni relatives toting carloads of clothes, bedding, personal items, storage containers, school supplies and other essential items for dorm life away from home.

Kimberly Catalan, 18, from Stamford, Connecticut, moved into Wilber Hall.

An aspiring fashion and textiles major, she was drawn to SUNY Oneonta for its fashion program and the scenic campus, which she toured in March.

"I've got a lot of my sewing stuff to get practicing," she said, "like fabrics. I brought my sewing machine as well."

Helping her move were her father, Juan Carlos Catalan, and 24-year-old sister, Carla Catalan.

"You realize how fast time goes by," Carla Catalan said, "because we're only six years apart. You realize, oh, now it's your turn. Now it's your time to experience college life university. It's a good thing."

College staff, assisted by campus police, kept the cars flowing. Families unpacked outside the residence halls, drove their vehicles to an overflow parking lot and then came back to start moving their things.

Outside Tobey Hall, Alexa Berger, an 18-year-old aspiring psychology student from Bellmore, Long Island, and her parents, Debbie and Seth Berger, emptied their vehicle onto carts and into bins.

Alexa Berger said she chose SUNY Oneonta because she likes the upstate atmosphere, and perhaps the chance to play volleyball like she did in high school.

This was the second move upstate in two months for the family — they moved Alexa's older sister, Samantha Berger, in early July into an apartment in Elmira, where she attends Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine.

"We definitely did not want to take two cars," Debbie said, "so I drove the whole way with stuff on my lap up to here," motioning to her chin.

Students arrived not only with carloads of new stuff, but the packaging that it comes in.

Outside each of the five freshman residence halls stood 30-cubic-foot cardboard dumpsters and separate styrofoam collection containers. Volunteers accepted the packaging from students for recycling.

The polystyrene packaging will go to the Otsego Re-Use Center, which accepts the plastic foam for recycling, and the cardboard will be recycled separately.

Rachel Kornhauser, SUNY Oneonta sustainability coordinator, said the school collected 250 pounds of polystyrene packaging last year.

"It's a way for us to show the students and their families as they're moving in that sustainability is a core value of the institution," she said.

Keeping the traffic flowing

At SUNY Oneonta, there's been a 36% increase in total applications for admission compared with the fall of 2022, and a more than 18% increase in new student deposits as of Aug. 22, according to information provided by the school.

That's a total of 1,662 new students, 1,335 first-year students and 327 transfers.

The school doubled its Educational Opportunity Program enrollment during the last year, reaching its largest class ever at 120 students, 108 of them first-years and 12 transfers.

Graduate programs reported a 6.8% increase in applications over last year and a 29% increase in deposits, primarily in online programs.

Students are coming from 15 states and seven countries, including study abroad exchange students. International students are from South Korea, Japan, Germany, Peru, India, Cambodia and Canada.

It was "all hands on deck" during move-in at the school, with dozens of staff, residence advisors and volunteers, in addition to about 23 campus police officers and staff, directing traffic and handing out SUNY Oneonta-themed swag at centralized check-in, which ran from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in two shifts.

All vehicles started at centralized check-in, where they were directed to the dorms based on color-coded zone passes.

"We're up here to start," George Archundia, SUNY Oneonta's associate director of orientation, move-in and welcome, said, "and then we really float around throughout the buildings and throughout campus to help with traffic flow, answering questions for families that maybe our volunteers just don't know the answer to, and we do some of that work."

Managing the flow of traffic was a top duty.

"If traffic gets backed up at a location while families are moving in and we have people up here from that building," Director of Residential Life Christine Edwards said, "then we'll have to hold them for a couple of minutes, maybe 10 minutes, so then we can let that traffic flow move forward. It just makes the experience not be frustrating for families."

SUNY Oneonta President Alberto Cardelle and his wife, Rachel Frick Cardelle, also were on hand to assist with move-in management.

Frick Cardelle assisted Wednesday at centralized check-in. She was the first person many of the new students and visiting families spoke to as they were welcomed onto campus.

"It's fun to see the parents, it's fun to see the siblings, and then it's nice to see the new faces that are coming in," she said. "What's amazing is that there's a lot of them that are coming in, and they have graduates in the car, like their mom or aunt who graduated 30 years ago."

Cardelle said move-in day "is one of the more exciting days on campus."

"We are bringing in 1,600 students, 1,300 first-time students, and over 300 transfer students," Alberto Cardelle said. "That gets us now two consecutive years of increases from the COVID years. This year, we're 20% up from last year. And this year, we're almost over 40%, up from two years ago. So we continue to close that gap."

He said the incoming freshman and sophomore classes are larger than the junior and senior classes due to a dip in student numbers during the pandemic.

"Once those two classes graduate, I think we'll be back to a very manageable number," he said.

SUNY Oneonta's Alumni Hall reopened Aug. 1 after a two-year renovation period to allow faculty and staff to move into their offices.

The $22 million renovation of the 47,000-square-foot building began in 2021 and was completed this summer, ready for the first day of classes Aug. 28.

The building now houses the school's business, economics and political science departments, as well as the Division of University Advancement.

Features include a Bloomberg Terminal stock trading simulation room, several state-of-the-art active-learning classrooms, a student entrepreneurial space, small group rooms, plenty of lounge study areas and a large conference room on the upper floor.

Philip Sirianni, SUNY Oneonta economic department chairperson, moved into his office on the day the building opened.

He said moving classrooms, faculty offices and student lounge and study areas under one roof will be more conducive to student learning.

"It's really a state-of-the-art building," he said. "There's quite a few spaces where students can go to where there's a whiteboard, they can work out problems together ... There are some great spaces for faculty and students to to meet."

Hartwick College also started its student move-in process Wednesday with its Wick Week activities. Check upcoming issues of The Daily Star for coverage of Thursday's opening convocation at Hartwick.