New Student Orientation at the University of Pennsylvania is not just about newcomers learning about Penn. It is also about current-student volunteers getting better acquainted with themselves.

Behind the scenes in the Office of New Student Orientation and Academic Initiatives are more than 170 volunteer members of Peers Helping Incoming New Students, or PHINS, all working together to make sure everything runs smoothly.

This year, two of the student coordinators who are leading the volunteers are Fola Onifade and Andre Ficerai. Both say NSO helped them learn things about themselves.

Onifade, who volunteered as part of the PHINS program last year, says her role as a coordinator is mostly “people management.”

An international relations major from Paterson, N.J., she has the responsibility of ensuring PHINS receive training and housing and that they get fed. She has to know their whereabouts at all times, making sure that they sign up for their shifts and show up to staff them.

“I’m still surprised on a daily basis by how much goes on in our office,” she says. “We are actively shaping many students’ very first experience at Penn. That’s pretty awesome.”

Volunteers’ shifts include stints working at scores of activities and events, many of which have been planned by Ficerai, one of the NSO student coordinators. He oversees more than 70 daytime and evening NSO events run by students.

Ficerai, who is from Pittsburgh, remembers during his interview being asked what advice he would give someone going into event planning.

“I said you have to be prepared for things to go wrong, preparing for every last little thing that could go wrong or cause us to stumble and try to ameliorate those things before they even happen.”

Ficerai, who was not a member of the PHINS program last year, gained his experience in planning events by working on Festival Latino at Penn during his freshman year and last year working on the planning board of QPenn, an annual weeklong celebration of LGBT culture at Penn.

“I'm an event planner in a lot of ways,” says Ficerai, an economics and Hispanic studies major. “But there's so much that goes into that title that one wouldn't expect.

One time, I was organizing a very large event on the same day as a Statistics for Economists midterm. Let's just say that the event went great, but the midterm didn't. I realized why I'm here, to gain experiences both in and outside the classroom, but never one at the expense of the other.”

Ficerai and Onifade draw on their own experiences as freshmen participating in NSO.

Ficerai says he never saw himself as someone who would say yes to the toga. But his favorite NSO memory is attending a toga party.

“I really came out of my shell. I remember loving creating the toga. I remember going and crowd surfing and having the best time of my life.”

Like Ficerai, Onifade stepped outside her comfort zone during NSO week and doesn’t regret doing it for one moment. She had never danced a lick but at an African Rhythms dance troupe event, Onifade, who was born in Nigeria, recalls thinking, “I’m African and this will be easy. It will be a fun way for me to meet people.”

She says while it turned out not to be as easy as she thought it would be, she met a girl who is now one of her best friends.

Since her freshman year, Onifade has worked at The Daily Pennsylvanian and is also a historian of the Black Wharton Undergraduate Association and a member of the Pi Delta Phi French honor society. Her advice to new Penn students is “don’t get caught up in the pre-professional hype.

“Learn for the sake of it and you will find your passion,” she says. “Enjoy every moment, the good, the bad and the ugly, because it all goes by way too fast!”