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There are really two ways students become Johnston. First, they can apply to Johnston as a part of their University application process. Second, University students can simply transfer to Johnston by meeting with the Johnston Director. How well, and in what ways, do incoming students formally or informally learn the Johnston process?
Johnston certainly does not have one simple answer to this question. Most formal, least personal, and least optional is the Johnston freshman seminar. Each University entering student enrolls in a seminar taught by that student's advisor and a student ``peer advisor''. Johnston students naturally have Johnston advisors, Johnston peer advisors, and Johnston Freshman seminars. Johnston freshman seminars differ from ordinary Johnston classes mostly in that they spend more class time discussing the processes involved in a Johnston education and a Johnston class, focusing on the class and graduation contract systems. For some students, the advisorial relationship that develops out of that seminar is fundamental to their Johnston education; other students find the relationship to be completely unhelpful and inappropriate and either try to find a new advisor or abandon the idea of advisors. Although the Freshman seminar helps some students a lot, and most students at least some, the most important parts of most students' learning about Johnston happens less formally.
With students of all ages and experience levels completely mixed together in every hall of the Johnston Complex, there are always older students to go to with questions. Additionally, the Community Meetings and hall programming provide an opportunity for Johnston students to get to know one another. According to one Johnston student, the social interactions, which very often include practical and theoretical academic discussions, really grow out of the communial living and decisionmaking.[25]
Of course, not every student is successful in that informal Johnston initiation. An experiment to meet all students' needs was attempted in the fall 1993. A course called the Johnston Practicuum was organized by Noah Wardrip-Fruin for incoming Johnston Freshmen. The course was optional, and generally only 5 or 10 students ended up participating. Noah's impression about the course was that many of the Freshman were simply not prepared to wonder about how to deal with Johnson. They just wanted to be thrown into, to figure out for themselves what the academic environment was like before taking anyone's advice, and to meet their social needs. As one of the students suggested, the course might have been much more helpful if offered in the second semester, when the students had a more concrete idea of what they wanted to do, so they could explore how they wanted to do that. Like many things at Johnston, with Noah taking leave in the fall of 1994, the Practicuum was discontinued.
GYST[SEE FOOTNOTE] is a retreat of the entire Johnston community, taking place about three weeks into each semester. The main events of the retreat are community-building and curriculum-building activities. From the mid seventies until 1993, the event took place at a rented campground in the nearby San Bernadino Mountains, with students bussed out and back in rented buses at the beginning and end of the weekend. Two years ago GYST was moved back to campus, mainly due to financial difficulties. Additionally, some community members thought GYST was working more to bring several smaller communities together within the greater community, rather than to bring the entire community together.
With GYST's move back onto campus, a number of students are choosing not to participate in some of the events. In part this seems to be due to some general feelings of discontent within the upperclassmen, a discontent that was passed on to the lower classes. My best reading on the discontent upperclassmen feel is due to the everpresent (and seemingly increasing) battles with the Student Life Office, which in the fall of 1994 means the overruling of the community's choice for Complex Director, and the strict restrictions on when upperclassmen were allowed to arrive back on campus.
The curriculum-building remains the most successful part of GYST, as the community-building function is taken over increasingly by less formal social interactions.