Evaluating Ospek

Ospek (an orientation time for freshmen in campus), is an event organized by the campus to welcome new students. The new students can be regarded as a new member of academician if they join it. Therefore, ospek can be concluded as a moment to welcome as well as introducing a relatively new environment for new students.

In general, ospek always associated with negative thing for some people. For example, sometimes people (including new students) imagine that ospek as activity / event for revenge time from senior to junior which filled with hard activities, bizarre, irrational, and generally 'torture' the freshmen. They got physical and mental violence, such as slap, excessive physical exercise, or punishment for the junior who is considered illogical. Mass media every year also cannot escape the stories of violence during ospek, which led to the suffering of new students (both physical and mental).

When I was involved in a committee ospek on campus, a mother (parents of new students) who accompanied her daughter to the front gate of the campus warned me not to do any violence, both physically and mentally. The mother assumed that ospek was a violent activity, so it is not safe for her to release her daughter alone to join ospek.

How is Good Ospek then?

 As the name implies, ospek must be an activity that aims to introduce and orient new students to the new environment and campus life. Then all the activities that would be performed when ospek should have well aim in the end and provide positive benefits to new students. Do not let them do something that actually has no benefit.

 For common activities in ospek, new students are required to perform / bring something strange, for example: asked to wear a banana hanging on the neck, bring a pair of weird socks, bring the trash, and so on. This is an example of wrong ospek, because it does nothing worth for new students. They did it solely to meet the senior command, where the seniors made it as a mean of making fun of freshmen. This kind of ospek should be avoided. There must be an essence that can be taken by students for their life on campus, for example: increasing awareness, increasing knowledge, creating a sense of leadership, removing the high school personalities which are bad, and switching to the personality of a good student.
  

Ospek must get certain permission by the campus. So, ospek is not an illegal activity organized by the student without any control from the higher side. The presence of the Dean of faculty mentors will make ospek activities run well and correctly, and prevent things that are not desirable.

Experience has proved that both physical and mental violence just bring a negative impact on participants. Physical violence has caused death in some cases, either because of direct physical violence (being hit, kicked, slapped, etc.) or indirectly (as told to carry a brick while walking with a considerable distance away, walked up, etc.). There is no one reason that can justify the existence of physical and mental abuse during ospek activities. New students are not an “animal”, or inanimate object that can be treated arbitrarily as desired by seniors. They are human beings, just like the seniors, who have physical and mental limits of endurance. The treatment that violates the physical and mental endurance of participants is a violation of human rights. Ospek committee must uphold it.

Good ospek is an activity, which as the name suggests introducing and orienting new students to the campus environment. There should be no violence, just dropped a new student both physically and mentally. Instead, they need to be equipped with knowledge and closeness to the campus to foster good spirit and a sense of student affairs as part of a large family of academic faculty.

(Artikel dimuat pada tanggal 28/06/2011 di harian lokal Radar Banyumas.)

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