PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 22, June 1, 2006

Housing DVD helps incoming students get fresh start

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by L. Brian Stauffer Previews of coming attractions New UI students who will be living in University Housing this fall are getting a preview of residence hall life – and practical tips and information about resources available to help them with their academics and with day-to-day living. The information is presented on a DVD called “Startin’ Fresh” produced by Donna Price Pumphrey, assistant director for media development in the Housing Division.

Erica Hernandez, a freshman majoring in theater, awakens in her dorm room, with a splitting headache, a sore throat and a cough. Hernandez doesn’t want to miss her psychology class that day – and thinks that she needs to see a doctor  – but can’t remember the name of the campus health center so she can call for an appointment. So Hernandez does what any bewildered freshman might do: She calls mom.

Getting medical treatment for a minor illness is just one of the many situations that new students leaving the family nest for college may have to contend with – along with doing their own laundry and figuring out how to hook up their computers to the university network.

To help orient incoming students to life on campus and in the residence halls, the Housing Division has created a DVD called “Startin’ Fresh” that has been mailed to the approximately 7,500 students who will move into university housing this fall.

Using a combination of video role plays and instructional segments, the nearly hour-long DVD shows new students what their first few days on campus may be like  and outlines the resources that are available to assist them with academics as well as day-to-day living.

In the role-play segments, student actors deal with mundane problems, such as locking themselves out of their rooms, going to a dining hall for the first time and getting treatment for a minor illness at McKinley Health Center, as Hernandez does in the  “Mom, I’m Sick – Or is There a Doctor in the House?” video. The video shows the viewer how to schedule a doctor’s appointment through McKinley’s Web site, and – from a first-person perspective, as if the viewer were Hernandez – walks the viewer into the health center for diagnosis and treatment by Dr. William Cifuentes and for a prescription, filled by pharmacist Dwayne Robinson.

Health educator Kim Rice, who helped develop the content for the McKinley segment, also appears in the video and discusses the various services that McKinley provides.

“I think that any way we can market to students and let them know what services are available to them is going to help them,” Rice said. “When they first get to campus, they’re inundated with all of the things that campus has to offer, and they may not choose to access health-care information immediately. … I think it’s important that they receive information in a variety of ways about the health and wellness services so that when they need those services, hopefully they’ll remember that those things are available for them here at McKinley.”

The videos on “Startin’ Fresh” are grouped into three modules:  “Getting Ready,” “Moving In” and “Settling In” and menus allow viewers to select and watch topics in random order.

“The Private Life of a Freshman” module gives the viewer a taste of what the dining halls, showers and laundry rooms in a dorm are like in addition to practical information about meal plans, front-desk services and how to download antivirus software to protect their computers. In “Junky Girl:  A Roommate Conflict,” roommates resolve a problem arising from one woman’s sloppy housekeeping with the help of a resident adviser.

Donna Price Pumphrey, assistant director for media development in the Housing Division, said this is the third year that Housing has created electronic media to orient its incoming residents, although it’s the first time they have used the DVD format.

“My first product was a CD-ROM, but we went to the DVD because we wanted to expand the possibilities from the student watching the video alone on their computer to perhaps having them watch it on TV in the family room with mom or dad there,” Pumphrey said. “We also wanted to send a message to the students that we try to be progressive and try to meet their needs in more innovative ways than perhaps we did 10 years ago.”

Pumphrey coordinated production of the DVD – including shooting much of the footage, writing the initial draft of the script and making her acting debut as Hernandez’s concerned mother in the McKinley video – with input from students and staff members.

Each of the videos on the DVD will be available for viewing on the Housing Division’s Web site at www.housing.uiuc.edu.
 The “Mom I’m Sick” video also is available on McKinley’s Web site at www.mckinley.uiuc.edu.

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