VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor

The University Learning Centre, an on-campus organization dedicated to providing University of Saskatchewan students with academic resources, launched a set of new student guide websites in early July.

For first-years in particular, the sites are a boon.

Accessible through the ULC main webpage, under a friendly greeting to anyone joining the student body this year, the site features an old leather suitcase with stickers for different groups of new students.

These take you to a page with a specific welcome message and more navigation options. The foremost of these is the “Need to know information” button, which brings together the simplest information for getting started at the U of S. It’s the best place to get started.

The target groups are varied, so a mature student isn’t necessarily accessing the same advice as an 18-year-old from Saskatoon. Since the site is a work in progress, more target groups are being added, like a page-in-progress for Royal West students. The resources are updated regularly.

“It’s always going to be a living document. We always want to provide the most updated information,” said Donna van de Velde, the ULC staff coordinator for the project.

The project was launched in April and driven by a group of eight students who contacted various student groups and campus establishments to find and condense advice for new students.

While mostly academic in nature, a lot of the resources provide simple help for adjusting to campus life. Van de Velde offered an example.

“Some students, they’ve been in school for three years and they’ve never taken the bus. For them, it was embarrassing to find out about the bus.”

The site also includes information about other forms of transportation, like carpool.ca and how to get a parking pass.

The advice included throughout the pages is simple and straightforward and focuses on the type of academic-related things that comfortable upper-years might forget about. A simple warning against e-mailing the whole class might prevent at least a few students from making that mistake.

Like the ULC itself, the goal of the page is to simplify the transition process.

“We had a student come in from Shelbrooke, wondering where to go on his first day,” van de Velde describes.

“Well, you go to your first class. But you know in high school, they have a pep ralley or something. He just wanted to know, what is the next step?”