Category Archives: First Year Experience

Freshmen Convocation

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Meet the Author

            Whether you enjoyed reading Orphan Train or not, meeting Christina Baker Kline was a great experience. As the students filled the theatre, excitement filled the air. We couldn’t wait to meet an award-winning author. Once Christina Baker Kline walked onto to stage, the convocation began. She started her presentation with her background, including her family, how long she’s been writing, and her inspiration behind the novel.  Obviously, the main topic she delved into was her muse for Orphan Train, which was her husband’s grandfather. In order to explain her muse behind the novel, she created a PowerPoint presentation. Here, she showed how she found out about her in-laws family history. Her husband’s grandfather rode an orphan train to the west. He was dropped off in a small town and was expected to start his life from nothing. Eventually, he was successful in starting his life and raising a family. This is the story behind the early roots of her husband’s family in America.

Along with personal family records, Christina used photographs of actual orphan trains, the Children’s Aid Society archived records, and interviews with actual train riders to accurately describe how orphans were treated during that time period. Specifically, she mentioned that Irish orphans with red hair were the least desired. Because of this strong anti-Irish sentiment, Christina Baker Kline used a redheaded Irish orphan as her main character. In a way, it showed how flawed the orphan trains were. If a family got an Irish orphan, he/she was usually treated the worst. By showing this side of the orphan trains, Christina Baker Kline led us to assume that other orphans were usually treated better.

Freshen convocation was a unique experience. I believe that all of us learned a good piece of insight towards the author and the novel. After the convocation was over,Orphan Train made a little more sense, both in theme and plotline. I understood why Baker Kline wrote the novel, and why the novel developed (in a depressing way) as it progressed towards the end. I am thankful for Professor Leonard and her associates for putting this convocation together

Blog 3: September 19th BINGO

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Tonight I played BINGO at the campus center. I am a big fan of any campus activities that involve prizes, which is what drew me to BINGO night. When everyone came in, a swipe of a Stockton ID card got you three BINGO boards. (A few rounds into BINGO night, they decided to give us each a fourth board to work with.) I asked what the prizes were going to be and was told that there was $200 worth of WaWa gift cards waiting to be given away. After finding that out I was very excited to begin playing.

The way the prizes worked was that every time someone won a game of BINGO, they would be given a raffle ticket. Most games had more than one winner. When someone won on the full board BINGO games, they received two raffle tickets. I won one game of BINGO and received one raffle ticket.

Half way into BINGO night they did the first drawing. There were ten winners of $10 WaWa gift cards. I was one of those winners. While I wanted to be perfectly happy with winning one gift card, the girl at the table next to mine won three, so I was a little jealous. However, my car’s gas tank will be happy to get $10 worth of free gas put into it. As the night went on, I was not lucky enough to win any more games of BINGO. At the end of the night they did the second drawing for ten winners of the remaining $10 WaWa gift cards. Three out of the four people at my table went home with gift cards, which was pretty cool.

Overall I really enjoyed BINGO night. I occasionally went out to BINGO with my mom at home with the little old ladies in church basements. However, I had to pay to get in and I never won. It was great to play a free game of BINGO and leave with more money than I had when I arrived. I will definitely be attending future campus center BINGO nights.

 

2014 Day of Service

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On Saturday September 6th, I attended Stockton’s Day of Service. For this event, breakfast was given in the morning, and then all of the participants were directed into the campus center event room at 8:00 am. Signs displaying the names of different organizations in need were posted at tables. Once inside, participants sat at the table corresponding with the organization he/she wanted to help with. I sat at the table for two local thrift shops. There were 6 available spots for people to sign up to go to the thrift shops; so three students went to each store. Everyone listened to Stockton’s President’s speech, and then we were off. With a bagged lunch in hand, the volunteers boarded the busses.

The bus ride was short. The driver was a Stockton maintenance employee, and he entertained us with facts about the college. First, he dropped off the chaperone and her three helpers, and shortly after he arrived at the thrift shop two other volunteers, our chaperone and I were assigned too. We went into the store at 10:30 am. The storeowner immediately gave us work to do. She requested the VCR tapes in the back of the store to be moved to the front, the little statues in the front to be moved to the back, and the baskets to be hung from the ceiling. We completed those tasks quickly, so the storeowner then asked us to individually decide what needed to be cleaned, moved, or organized and do that to make the shelves look more appealing. She was so grateful for something as simple as organizing shelves.

One volunteer organized all of the holiday decorations, another organized all of the children’s toys, and I organized the greeting cards. The store looked so much cleaner and orderly when we left, and the storeowner looked a lot happier.

Freshman Convocation: Christina Baker Kline

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Freshman Convocation – Speaker: Christina Baker Kline, Author of Orphan Train

Standing at the front of the Richard Stockton Performing Arts center at 4:30pm Thursday, New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline welcomed her audience after her introduction. The room was at maximum capacity, but silenced by the shared interest in the topic of discussion: Orphan Train. Several students had papers and pens out, but little writing was done once Baker Kline began speaking, her diction capturing her audience’s attention just as her novel did this semester. After thanking Stockton for the warm welcome, Baker Kline said that she would be discussing the process she went through to write the book and her sources of inspiration for her plot and characters.

Upon turning her presentation to the next page, a picture of her eldest son at the age of nine appeared, sitting at a piano with a pirate costume on. From here, Baker Kline elaborated on how her son and mother-in-law stumbled upon an article about orphan train riders, and in there found the mother-in-law’s father along with his siblings. Not only had she and the rest of her family not known of his experience on the train, but the very existence of orphan trains was a shock to Baker Kline and even her historian husband. This moment sparked her interest in writing a story of the orphan trains.

When talking about how she felt as she approached writing this story, Baker Kline revealed that she initially felt trepidation at taking on the project. She said that it didn’t feel right for her to write the story, as someone who wasn’t a train rider, wasn’t related to one, and had very limited knowledge of them. However, her desire to publicize the history of the orphan trains, especially as the generation affected by these events passes on, overwhelmed her and so she began work on her novel. Initially not intending for the novel to be labeled as historical fiction, Baker Kline wanted her book to be true to the research she had conducted, and then to show the aged train rider and how some still live with these scars decades later. Her interviews with train riders revealed information that would help her mould her story; she told her audience that she wanted the riders to feel as though they were involved in the making of the story. Baker Kline reveals the details she included–such as Vivian being a redheaded, Irish, girl of 9 whose parents died in a fire–were common to many orphans on the train and were characteristics that made a child less likely to be adopted.

Important to Baker Kline however, was avoiding sentimentalizing the story, and holding true to the tales she heard of from the trains. She heard from many stories that in the end, the riders were appreciative of their journeys due to where it had brought them, to happiness with their children and grandchildren. Baker Kline was very interested in showing the ability for Vivian, even at the age of ninety-one, to resolve her past and overcome her regrets by moving forward to correct her mistakes. As Baker Kline finished her talk, the room erupted into applause. Students excitedly asked questions, their hands waving in the air, and Christina took her time to thoroughly answer each question. Sadly, the time passed quickly, and everyone moved to the lobby for the book signing, wrapping up a wonderful night.

Freshman Blog: Going Green at the ACUA

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Students beat the heat on September 9th as part of Stockton’s annual Day of Service. The event began at 8:00 am with students receiving a free breakfast before going to meet with the volunteer heads for over a dozen activities. Some of the activities were on-campus, while others required a short ride in a van. I volunteered for the ACUA (Atlantic County Utilities Authority), with Professor Greene being our volunteer head.

This was my first time attending the Day of Service, but it did feel very confusing at first. I signed up for the event on the day it started, expecting it to be full of volunteer organizations looking for students to help them throughout the year. This did not turn out to be the case, as I found out. The Day of Service did live up to its name, but I feel like freshman students barely had any information going into the event, as other people who were freshman or first year transfer students in my group were confused as well. The ACUA’s event also could have been more specific, as many of us thought we will be going to a park to pick up trash.

Once we arrived at the ACUA, we were given shirts with the company’s acronym on it, as well as gloves. The ACUA maintains greenhouses and rents plots to communities and individuals and contains a recycling facility for all the recyclable waste in Atlantic County. We were introduced to an associate from the company and were tasked with helping clear the greenhouse from various weeds that had grown there over the summer. We worked for two hours pulling various species of plants from the greenhouse, until the extreme heat brought us indoors for an early lunch. We were very successful, cleaning out a large majority of the weeds in the greenhouse to be turned into compost.

For the second half of the day, we got to visit the community plots and pull weeds as well. However, the relative heat and humidity, as well as our group being very tired and overheated from our few hours in the greenhouse meant we only cleaned the gardens for an hour before leaving early.

Overall, the day was a success. Keeping the greenhouses clean is an important community service, as we learned that not only do people from Atlantic City come to garden but people from communities that are farther away as well. Most people cannot upkeep their plots, which is how poison ivy or weeds spread and invade into other plots, ruining the garden. It also was a nice outing to learn about different kinds of plants, since my group needed to weed out mint plants, which spread and invaded one part of the gardens. Even if the weather was very disagreeable, I found it enjoyable, as I did not have many opportunities to work or keep a garden during my years in high school.