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NSO Kick-Off

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Students who need accommodations to attend or participate in any orientation session should contact the Office of Disability Services at disability.services@cgu.edu as soon as possible.

Virtual Help Desk
Members of CGU’s NSO Committee will be available on kick-off day, Tuesday, August 20, to assist you through our virtual help desk.

Available Day of

Friday, January 17, 2025

12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. PDT (Pacific Daylight Time)

We are excited to kickoff New Student Orientation with you on Friday, January 17! Our event emcee, President of the Student Senate, Katja Crusius, will start us off with a warm welcome followed by our Executive Vice President & Provost, Michelle Bligh, to facilitate our symbolic pinning ceremony. We will then hear from our special keynote speaker, Shamini Dias, the Director of Transdisciplinary Curriculum and Special Projects at CGU.

Shamini Dias

Shamini Dias is Co-Director of CGU’s Transdisciplinary Studies program and the MA in Transdisciplinary Studies.

Shamini is an alumna of CGU and holds a PhD in Education. Her first two degrees were in Linguistics and English Literature from the National University of Singapore, where she explored complexity and chaos theory, feminist and post-colonial thought, and post-human philosophy. Shamini is an educator, communications consultant, and teaching-artist with schools, museums, and communities. As a scholar-practitioner, and an avid transdisciplinary boundary crosser and integrator, she has engaged people of all ages and disciplinary domains, from Pre-K through college and in corporate spaces.

As an international student at CGU, Shamini was engaged actively in student life and leadership, peer mentoring, and in supporting research and writing skills at the Writing Center. Post-graduation she founded CGU’s unique Preparing Future Faculty program (now integrated with the Center for Academic and Faculty Excellence) using transdisciplinary principles that connect relationality, joy, inclusion, and equity-minded principles for transformative education and leadership. She continues this development in Transdisciplinary Studies integrating ideas from complexity science, storytelling and theatre, leadership, and learning sciences to engage CGU scholars in integrating  creative, adaptive capacities for positive social impact in research and practice. Shamini is also the Editor of The STEAM Journal, a transdisciplinary open-access journal for boundary-crossing and arts-science integration.