New Collegians Prepare for Convention Clogging

On top of the usual uncertainties that surround the first week of college – roommates, classes, and how to find the dining hall – the thousands of freshmen arriving in New York at the end of August are facing an additional unknown: sharing their new hometown with a 300,000-person political convention.“I’m actually really frustrated about it. It’s really hard going away to college anyway; it’s going to be so busy, and this just makes things more difficult,” said Gillian Berrow, an 18-year-old from Concord, Calif., and incoming freshman at NYU. Like most new college students around the city, Ms. Berrow’s orientation program happens to fall on the same week as the Republican Nation al Convention.“Everybody I’ve talked to is pretty stressed out about it,” she said.When her parents tried to book a room at the nearby Gramercy Park hotel, where they stayed on their first visit to the college, she said they found only “astronomical” rates. “We couldn’t afford that, and it was really hard to find another hotel room.”Parents “are finding it very, very difficult” to find accommodations, said Carol Merles, a Long Island travel agent who typically helps NYU parents book hotels. Unless they opt to stay in Westchester or New Jersey, she said, “they’re paying a lot of money for a dump in the city.”Ms. Berrow’s family eventually found cheap beds at the school’s student-run hotel, but concerns still remained, fueled in part by chatter on online bulletin boards for new students. “I’ve heard cabs are going to charge people more because there are so many people coming in,” Ms. Berrow said.In recent weeks, administrators at colleges such as NYU and Columbia have begun planning for convention-week headaches by inviting students to move in a day earlier than usual, sending letters home warn ing about delays, and setting up telephone hotlines for worried parents – all the while reiterating the famous post-9/11 New York mantra: “business as usual.”But such provisions are doing little to shift students’ and parents’ feelings about the potential convention chaos, feelings that range from concern to excitement to ambivalence.Among the many parents not looking forward to the move-in is Kim Fogarty of Bay Shore, who will be helping her son Ryan move in to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts on the Saturday before the convention. The ongoing threat of terrorism is not a major concern, she said, but the inevitable traffic congestion, parking regulations, and security stops are.“Moving somebody into college, you know what our truck will look like,” Ms. Fogarty said. “If they try to inspect us, I’m going to make them pack us back up.”Instead of taking the Holland Tunnel, she and her husband will drive through Brooklyn to get to NYU. “Very honestly it’s a nightmare. I wish I could do it another weekend, but what are you gonna do?”Kathleen Kan, an incoming freshman at Columbia who will be driving in with her parents from Connecticut, said she was mostly unconcerned about interruptions due to the convention, especially since her school is located 100 blocks from the convention.“Actually, I am excited the more I think about it. At least I’ll be there and I can actually go,” she said, expressing an interest in joining anti-GOP demonstrations. Protest organizers from other schools had invited her and other incoming freshmen by e-mail to join anti-GOP demonstrations, she said.Students hoping to take part in the convention will also be juggling a busy schedule of unpacking and orienteering. “During orientation we have them fully booked, 9 to 5,” said Jason Caroll, an orientation organizer at NYU. “We won’t be encouraging [protesting] or telling them about protests, so it’s up to the students to find out about them.”As usual, some orientation programs will be geared toward making out-of-town students feel comfortable in the city, especially during the convention. “We want to make sure they’re advised, informed, and given the proper information, that they are aware of the neighborhoods,” said NYU spokesperson Richard Pierce of the students who will be exploring the city during the week of the Convention.Nonetheless, the convention and its protests promise to provide ample distraction from schools’ orientation programs. The protests, including the largest one, are planned for the Sunday before the convention, when many schools begin their orientations.But “in a place like Columbia you kind of feel like you should be involved in the protest,” Atossa Abrahamian, a new Columbia freshman, wrote in an e-mail.Despite students’ desires to acclimate to college life in the big city, Michael Gould-Wartofsky, a student organizer for the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, an activist group, said he expected many students to rally. “From what I’ve been hearing, a lot of freshmen would rather miss a few days of orientation to take part in protests,” he saidHe said he also knew of freshmen and other early-arrival students who would be offering valuable dorm room floor space to out-of-town protestors looking for a place to unroll their sleeping bags.While most schools aren’t near the convention site at Madison Square Garden, Yeshiva University’s Beren women’s campus and CUNY’s Graduate Center are both located two blocks to the east of the Garden. Spokesmen said that despite high security precautions, both buildings will remain open.Peter Ferrara, a spokesman for Yeshiva, said that moving in would be a challenge for the 1,000 women moving into the dorms that week. “Orientation and registration is already fairly challenging for students and parents; this ramps it up,” he said. The school’s orientation program of baseball games and city tours will go ahead, with an expectation for delays. “It will be a bit more challenging,” he said.A spokesman from the NYC Host Committee said: “The city has a plan to ensure that businesses, residents, commuters, students, and visitors can go about their lives during the convention.”Emma Poltrack, an incoming NYU freshman, said she didn’t think the convention would affect her week significantly, but was still nervous about the possibility of terrorism.“It’s silly to change your actions because of some unfounded idea of a threat, but on the other hand, if anything were to happen, it makes sense that it would happen that week/weekend,” Ms. Poltrack wrote in an e-mail.Meanwhile, Michael Arena, a CUNY spokesman, said that the CUNY system has planned no changes to its routine, and that the most common concern he’s heard from the largely commuter student body was over subway delays.“Believe me, we’re used to it,” he said. “Those kinds of things people live with day in and day out in this city.”

New Collegians Prepare for Convention Clogging

New Collegians Prepare for Convention Clogging

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