A word to incoming Freshmen from Blake Barr ‘16

Me
Hi everyone, my name is Blake Barr and I am current senior here at Cornell. There’s a ton of great things to get involved in here “On the Hill”, but I wanted to talk about my favorite experience at Cornell: Pre-Orientation Service Trips (POST).
Senior Team Leaders preparing for team leader interviews
POST is a pre-orientation program that revolves around community service. For those who might not know what a pre-orientation program is (I sure didn’t as a prospective student.), it’s a program for incoming students to Cornell that occurs a week before orientation in August. POST is the pre-orientation program that is run by the Public Service Center (The place at Cornell for all things volunteering, check out their website!). If you participate in POST, you would get to do community service projects at different non-profits throughout Ithaca during the day with other incoming students. Additionally, at night, we have various social activities around Cornell and Ithaca.
2015 Post participants. I’m in the front row.
Looking back to when I was in your shoes, I chose to participate in POST for several reasons. First, I wanted to get to know other incoming students. Coming from California, I did not know anyone else coming into college, and I thought that participating in POST would be a great way to gain friends before college even starts. Secondly, I wanted to get acquainted with the Ithaca area, and learn about the community I would be living in for the next four years.
At the end of the week, POST had given me all that and more. One of the immense benefits of POST that I had not anticipated was befriending the 14 upperclassmen POST leaders who are there to answer your questions during the week of POST and during your time at Cornell. The POST leaders made the transition into college so much easier!
Me and my fellow senior team leaders, Kelly Albanir and Bennett Napili, 2015
I enjoyed my POST experience so much that I came back as a leader and have done POST four times now. I am sad that my time with POST and Cornell are coming to end, but looking back, participating in the POST program was the best decision I made here. It got me connected with peers and mentors early, and made me feel much more comfortable at the start of college.

Blake Barr

Class of 2016