Each spring semester, around fifty students matriculate as January admits, colloquially referred to as “Jans.” Recently, the Jan community on campus created the Jan Committee, a group that hopes to address challenges some Jans say they face.
Committee leader and founder Matt Knowlton ’21 created the group this semester.
“Whenever I would meet older Jans, we’d laugh about our problems. But why should we have to laugh about our problems when we can change them?” said Knowlton. “In my Levitt Leader Institute class, I saw a bunch of people doing commitment projects to build community. I was inspired to do something behind the scenes to help Jans administratively.”
After coming to Hamilton in the spring, Knowlton said some Jans find transitioning to campus life different than the majority of students who start in the fall. This led him and other Jans to start an organized group where they could address issues specific to Jans among themselves and members of the administration.
Tessa Chefalo, Director of Orientation and First-Year Programs, is one of the administrators working with the group.
“My work is almost entirely about new students’ transition to campus,” she said, “and I recognize that Jans have a unique experience — from admission through their first spring, and potentially through their entire careers at Hamilton.”
Ella Antolini ’21, a member of the committee’s E-Board, agreed.
“I think with so few of us, our transition can be relatively easy to overlook,” she said. “The purpose of the committee is to make sure that there is a voice for the group and a formal link to the administration to bring to light issues with the January admission program.”
Chefalo said a team of administrators regularly meets to discuss all aspects of the Jan experience and address such concerns.
“The team includes representatives from admissions, the registrar’s office, off-campus study, and me,” said Chefalo. “Over the past two-and-a-half years we have collaboratively identified themes, challenges, and successes in the Jan transition, and also put into place a number of changes.”
Besides academic changes, some Jans, like Knowlton, say they also encounter a difficult social transition into the already-established student body when they arrive on campus.
Knowlton described personally feeling “a lack of community” as a Jan coming to campus. “[The College] talks about a community and a Hamily, but it’s not tangible — it’s all abstract for the Jans,” he said.
The goal of the Jan committee is to affect the alleged organizational and structural issues with the program. “The purpose of the committee is to effectively commit change on campus in terms of acceptance and the transition and the program itself,” said Knowlton.
Chefalo will act as the official mentor between the group and the administration. “I am excited to partner with the Jan committee,” she said. “This committee has the potential to benefit Jans in nearly all aspects of their social and academic transitions to campus by building deeper community among students, helping to create more robust support networks, and further identifying and exploring the experiential learning opportunities that the Jan fall semester presents.”
Through consistent discussion with the College’s admissions office and administration, the committee hopes to be a temporary measure, working itself out of existence by solving the issues they identify.
“Our goal is to make the solutions and make everything as easy as possible for admissions to fix,” said Knowlton. “So if administration doesn’t solve our problems, we will solve them ourselves.”
Still, Knowlton said he is optimistic about the outward approval he has seen from faculty and administrators.
“We have great people who want to support us, like professors and Tessa Chefalo,” he said. “Every faculty member I have talked to has been eager to find change for the Jan program and to support the students in any way possible.”
Chefalo agreed, saying, “I know the Jan transition is on the radar of others within the College.” She added that administration has made efforts to address these issues, stating that she has “mentioned the growth of this committee to a number of my colleagues, and all have been enthusiastic about its formation, and interested in hearing about new ideas that develop from the committee’s work.”
