By Megann Horstead
Every year new students—first years and transfers—enter the North Central College community with their own experiences and aspirations. NCC’s Orientation staff is focused on helping to acclimate students to NCC student life.
Apart from programming, the orientation staff along with the help of the Office of Student Affairs staff generated a book—Information Central—that holds everything that an NCC student should know, particularly, campus lingo.
Since the book’s creation, NCC’s orientation staff has been the sole entity responsible for making annual updates.
Director of Student Involvement Amy Clarke Sievers said that the goal of lingo and its inclusion in the orientation of new students is an attempt “to figure out the best way to communicate with our new students what they will hear when they’re here.”
Allie Youngren, an orientation leader, said that during Welcome Week, for instance, students may struggle to remember the campus lingo and use any language that they can remember things by.
She added, “…but then they tend to own it more and more as the year goes on and they hear older students.” With that said, newer students start to pick up the lingo and use the appropriate acronym or nickname used to identify things on campus.
Much like the real world, universities and colleges everywhere all have adapted a lingo that students use to communicate. In some respects, the university and college settings represent separate cultures, all having an identifiable lingo.
Clarke Sievers explained the idea of cultures using lingo as a means to identify with a culture, such as NCC, when she said that the College is unique in the way the community refers to each of its weeks by number as the school terms progress.
In terms of widening the appeal of NCC’s lingo and keeping it fresh and innovative, Clark Sievers said, “I think that the strategy that I’ve used is that we have a new staff of orientation team leaders each year… It’s mostly about relying on student leaders to take a look at the document and say, ‘Hey, We should really add these things.’”
Jack Shindler, professor of language and linguistics, added, “If you compare it (lingo) to language itself, in a way, it’s been proven that kids in many ways reinvent language and in some ways that’s what happens here. An institution is like a kid that gets its place in the world and makes up a language that it perpetuates. In that sense, it really can be created from nothing just like a kid makes up a word.”
Put another way, lingo is derived at and maintained by taking into account the different uses of language as it is heard and used by a diverse group of students, said Clark Sievers.
In terms of changes to Information Central, students may notice that “Hal” and “SNAC” are no longer included in NCC’s lingo. Youngren revealed that students should expect to see “BOHO,” also known as the Boilerhouse, listed in the next installment of Information Central. Along the same lines, “#WACKWEEKENDS,” formerly branded as SNAC, is another term that is being used across campus that is slated to appear in Information Central.
