There are things incoming students simply need to get done.
They need to be advised.
They need to register for classes.
They may need to complete placement testing, submit requirements, understand their schedule, resolve outstanding items, and figure out where they’re supposed to be.
Every institution handles those things differently.
Some complete advising and registration before students arrive for orientation. Others intentionally make advising and course registration part of the orientation experience.
After more than 25 years working alongside orientation professionals, I don’t think there is one model every institution should follow.
But I do think there is a resource we sometimes forget is finite.
Human attention.
And that has me thinking differently about how we design orientation.
An hour spent doing one thing is an hour that cannot be spent doing something else.
That’s not an argument against advising.
It’s not an argument against course registration.
And it’s certainly not an argument against the operational work necessary to successfully bring a student into an institution.
Those things matter.
The question is whether all of the work surrounding them needs to consume the same human time.
If an advisor spends part of an appointment gathering information that could reasonably have been available beforehand, that’s time they aren’t spending advising.
If students enter course registration without enough preparation and the process runs longer than necessary, that time has to come from somewhere.
If an orientation leader spends the day repeatedly answering, “Where am I supposed to be?” that’s time they aren’t spending doing something much harder for technology to reproduce.
They aren’t noticing the student standing alone.
They aren’t making an introduction.
They aren’t answering the question a new student may be reluctant to ask a professional staff member.
They aren’t helping a large university begin to feel a little smaller.
They aren’t getting the opportunity to help someone begin feeling like they belong there.
That leads to a question I think is worth asking:
What work requires orientation time, and what work is simply occupying orientation time because that’s where we’ve historically put it?
I want to be careful here because this is where a useful conversation can quickly become a prescription.
I don’t believe VisualZen should tell institutions where advising belongs.
The institution owns its orientation model.
There are institutions that intentionally complete advising or registration before students arrive for an in-person orientation experience.
There are others where advising and course registration are important parts of the orientation program itself.
Both can be right.
The more interesting question is what happens around those decisions.
If advising belongs during orientation, can students and advisors arrive better prepared for the conversation?
If course registration belongs during orientation, can the work leading to registration be structured so students arrive ready to make those decisions?
If advising or registration happens beforehand, what is the institution intentionally doing with the time it has created during orientation?
There is an important difference between removing something from orientation and creating capacity within orientation.
The second is what interests me.
This summer, Laura Randolph and the team at Rutgers University gave us an opportunity to see some of this thinking put into practice.
Rutgers didn’t remove advising and course registration from its orientation experience.
Instead, they worked on how those experiences were structured.
Laura told me they incorporated a true advising session on day one, with individual schools providing tailored content to their students.
Then students moved into course registration on day two.
After the summer, Laura told me that, for the most part, schools reported the day-one work improved day two.
In previous years, students could run over during course registration and sometimes had to be pulled out of labs because the process was taking too long.
Laura said they saw very little of that this year.
She believes there is a relationship between the advising work on day one and what they experienced during registration on day two.
That doesn’t prove every institution should follow the same model.
It illustrates something more useful:
You don’t necessarily have to remove important work from orientation to create more room. Sometimes you can improve the preparation around it.
We were working with Rutgers on another problem at the same time.
Personalized orientation scheduling.
But our goal wasn’t simply to make a nicer schedule.
We were interested in what could happen if students had clearer ownership of their individual experience.
Laura told me that students were able to see the larger pieces of their schedule in advance, with more tailored advising and registration information becoming available closer to their session.
After the program, I asked her what difference she saw.
Her answer wasn’t about how the schedule looked.
She said they experienced fewer moments of confusion among both students and orientation leaders.
Students knew where they were supposed to be.
Instead of wandering around trying to determine what was happening next, students could approach someone knowing their destination and ask for help getting there.
That may sound like a small operational improvement.
I don’t think it is.
The question changed from:
“What am I supposed to be doing?”
to something closer to:
“I know where I’m supposed to be. Can you help me get there?”
The technology didn’t eliminate the human interaction.
It changed what the human interaction could be used for.
Laura made another observation that has stayed with me.
She felt personalized scheduling helped students take greater ownership of their experience instead of functioning as passive participants waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
That’s important for the student.
I think it’s equally important for the orientation leader.
Orientation leaders are an extraordinary resource.
They have something a software platform doesn’t.
They know what it feels like to be a student at that institution.
They can recognize uncertainty.
They can tell a story.
They can make an introduction.
They can notice someone.
They can answer a question differently because they remember having the same question themselves.
They can say, “Come sit with us.”
That’s why I don’t want an orientation leader spending the entire day functioning as a human schedule.
If technology can appropriately handle more of the basic operational work, that doesn’t make the orientation leader less important.
It makes their time more valuable.
When I asked Laura whether personalized scheduling was now part of the Rutgers model for next year, her answer was straightforward:
“Yes, hands down.”
I’m proud of that.
Not because we built a schedule.
Because we’re beginning to understand what the schedule can give back.
This distinction matters to me.
Higher education technology frequently talks about efficiency.
Save time.
Automate a process.
Reduce steps.
Increase completion.
Those things can be valuable.
But I don’t think efficiency is enough of an outcome by itself.
If we give an advisor ten minutes back, what happens during those ten minutes?
If an orientation leader answers fewer logistical questions, what do they do with that additional attention?
If students complete something before orientation instead of during orientation, what does the institution intentionally put in its place?
If technology removes friction but we immediately fill the space with another presentation, have we actually accomplished what we intended?
Efficiency creates capacity.
What people do with that capacity is where this gets interesting.
I’ve also been thinking about this beyond the orientation event itself.
There is an operational side of bringing a student into an institution.
Can I complete my requirements?
Can I get advised?
Can I register?
Do I know where I’m going?
Do I know what happens next?
Those questions matter.
But there is another set of questions students are experiencing, whether or not they ever say them out loud.
Do I know anybody here?
Does anybody know me?
Can I figure this place out?
Is there someone I can ask for help?
Do I belong here?
Can I see myself staying here?
Removing administrative friction doesn’t automatically answer those questions.
Removing friction can create more room for the people who can.
That’s an important distinction.
I don’t believe we should say:
“Remove the red tape and students will stay.”
Student persistence is far more complicated than that.
But I do believe it’s worth asking whether we can remove avoidable red tape so students and the people supporting them have more opportunity to develop the relationships, confidence and connections that matter throughout the transition.
This thinking is also influencing what we’re building next at VisualZen.
We call it Onboarding Intelligence.
And I want to be deliberate about what that means.
I’m not interested in putting AI in front of students simply so we can say VZOS uses AI.
I’m not interested in technology making institutional judgments about students.
And I’m certainly not interested in replacing the professionals who understand their students, their institution and their orientation model.
I’m interested in something quieter.
As students move through preparation, registration, orientation and the transition that follows, they create signals.
They complete things.
They don’t complete things.
They participate.
They stop participating.
They interact with different parts of the journey.
Patterns begin to emerge.
The opportunity is to help the people doing this work make better sense of appropriate information so they can exercise better-informed human judgment about where their attention may matter.
The intelligence should work underneath the experience.
The professional should remain above it.
That distinction is fundamental to what we’re building.
In some ways, I think success means the student may never know much of this is happening.
A student doesn’t need to know that technology helped organize information before an advising conversation.
They experience an advisor who is better prepared to talk with them.
They don’t need to understand the logic behind their personalized orientation schedule.
They experience knowing where they’re supposed to be.
They don’t need to know that information helped a professional recognize something deserving attention.
They experience someone reaching out.
And they certainly don’t need AI competing for attention during one of the most human transitions of their educational journey.
They should experience the result of people being better informed and having more capacity to help them.
That’s the kind of intelligence that interests me.
This is one reason the launch and continued evolution of VZOS is so important to VisualZen.
VZOS is our Orientation Management Platform for colleges and universities.
Orientation remains the work we know most deeply.
But orientation doesn’t exist in isolation.
There is preparation before it.
There is advising.
There is registration.
There are requirements.
There is the orientation experience itself.
There is the space between orientation and the first day of classes.
There is Welcome Week.
And then there is everything that follows as a student begins navigating college.
We’re learning more about those connections alongside the institutions we serve.
And recently, for the first time, I had the opportunity to look at data and analysis from some of our early work examining signals associated with student melt.
I was genuinely excited by what I saw.
Not because I think we’ve discovered a formula that predicts whether a student will succeed.
We haven’t.
And not because I believe technology should decide which students deserve attention.
It shouldn’t.
I was excited because I could begin seeing how information already being generated through the onboarding journey might eventually help professionals make better-informed decisions about where to look, what questions to ask and where human attention could potentially matter.
There is a lot more work to do.
That’s exactly why I’m excited about it.
Information can often be delivered again.
A requirement can sometimes be completed earlier.
A schedule can be personalized.
Systems can organize information.
Processes can be redesigned.
But there are moments during a student’s transition into college that are much harder to recreate.
The conversation with an advisor who actually has time to listen.
The orientation leader who notices someone standing alone.
The first person who remembers a student’s name.
The introduction that becomes a friendship.
The moment a student stops feeling like they’re visiting a university and begins imagining that they might belong there.
Those moments are scarce.
We should design our technology accordingly.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
Should advising happen before orientation or during it?
Should registration happen here or there?
Should technology automate more?
Those are implementation questions, and institutions will answer them differently.
I think the more important question comes first:
What are we actually trying to protect when we design orientation?
Once we know that, we can make much better decisions about what the technology should do.
And, just as importantly,
what it shouldn’t.
See HOW we’re approaching orientation differently.
Talk with VisualZen about your institution’s 2027 orientation model and see VZOS in action.