Help for the hopelessly lost, confused and dumbfounded

The Pitt campus covers 140 square acres, and it includes more than 70 University buildings,… The Pitt campus covers 140 square acres, and it includes more than 70 University buildings, housing more than 30 different administrative offices.

Last fall, more than 17,000 undergraduate students and 9,000 grad students were enrolled at Pitt. At the same time, the University employed more than 4,000 faculty members, 700 research associated and 6,000 librarians, secretaries, residence hall guards, career consolers, maintenance workers and staff members of other sorts.

In other words, Pitt is a large, populous place, and it is inevitable that many new students will sometimes feel overwhelmed.

Luckily, there are organizations dedicated to helping ease new students into life at Pitt.

One such organization is the Freshman Peer Counselors. These students run the two-day summer PittStart program, during which they teach new students to navigate Pitt’s Web site, help them select classes for the fall, inform them about which placements tests they need to take and more.

At the end of the first day, if students opt to stay overnight, Freshman Peer Counselors organize activities to nudge new students into Pitt’s social scene.

A group that offers a helping hand to new students after they begin at Pitt is the Blue and Gold Society. A branch of the Alumni Association, this group does everything from organizing focus groups concerning Pitt-related issues, to carrying student feedback to university administrators, to handing out hot chocolate to fans standing outside the Petersen Event Center before basketball games.

Its mission is to “promote the University of Pittsburgh, its interests and goals among future and current students, alumni and friends, and to instill in them the value of a life-long relationship with the University.”

In other words, these group members, identifiable by their blue shirts with a single gold stripe, hope you are in it for the long haul and would be glad to help you get adjusted during your first few weeks.

A third resource for information about Pitt is Telefact, which can be contacted at (412) 624-FACT, or 4-FACT on a campus phone.

Telefact is a University-funded, student-run information hotline that “provide[s] answers for any and all questions presented by callers,” according to its mission statement. Its staff is “committed to providing you with a fast, efficient and accurate source of information about the University, the city and the universe at large.”

You can call Telefact when you need directions to a university building, need schedules for Pitt’s shuttle services, or have any question concerning who is in charge of what at Pitt and how to contact them about it.

But, because Telefact covers “the universe at large,” you can also call them for movie show times, sports scores, the current temperature, the year the Abraham Lincoln penny was first minted (1909), the film that earned Robert De Niro his first Oscar (“Raging Bull”), or what programs competed against The Ed Sullivan Show the night of The Beatles’ first appearance (“Disney World of Color” and the “ABC Nightly News”).

No matter what your question or concern, there is likely an organization on campus that can help guide you toward an answer. Hopefully, with the assistance of these groups, Pitt will no longer seem like such a big, bad place.