Hope they are okay

Our dean can't even deliver a heartfelt message of support without robotically reading from AI prompts. This school does. not. care.

I'm an alum who was accepted for my master's starting in the spring, but I'm trying to defer to start in the fall. The form to request a deferral was open about a week or two ago, but now the website won't load. The form didn't have the option to defer from spring to fall yet, so I was waiting. Does anyone know what might be wrong with it, or should I go ahead and try to contact my GPD or advisor about deferring?

I’m planning to apply to an undergraduate program through ODUGlobal, but I just wanted to know how much I can expect to pay in total for tuition? Are there any fees not mentioned on the website that I should expect? How much are you guys paying in total and how much would be per credit?

Hi I’m a 20 year old college student coming from Philly (Drexel). I just moved to the area this week and am looking to make friends. I’m currently an intern engineer on the Hampton roads tunnel bridge project and so will be in the area for the next couple months. Are there any good social hot spots or ways to meet people.

Are there any non trads out there having a tough time making friends out here? I feel too old for most of my classmates but want to make friends out here. I spend a lot of time on campus and there’s not really many things that cater to older non trad students. How are yall making friends?

Hi I need help, any number or email I receive I get generic auto prompt emails with no genuine responses. I ask for someone to call me or call numbers and it goes failed busy numbers or no response from left voicemails. I just need to know what my current degree will go towards and how the hybrid program works how many times they meet etc. Please if anyone who has gone through the computer science masters program recently please message me so I can just get a scope of how my GI bill will work and what programs are available for me and the general work load. I don’t know why it’s so hard to just talk to a person anymore

My account was zeroed out today but I still haven’t received an email saying it was processed. Help ?

https://c.org/gnB94T9Nkd
On Wednesday, October 21st there was a student suicide on the campus of Old Dominion University in an academic building known as Batten Arts & Letters (BAL). The day of this tragic event, the building was closed for the rest of day - but the rest of campus was expected to operate as normal. The day after, classes were held in the building it took place in. Students began making a memorial with flowers, messages, and posters outside of the building. On Monday, October 26th, not even a full week after the event, an email was sent out to all members of the campus community stating: “Later today, we will begin the process of respectfully gathering and removing these items from the outside of the building. I understand that each item carries meaning for someone, and I want to reassure you this process will be handled with the care and sensitivity that these tributes deserve.” I share disgust and anger with my peers of how poorly the institution has handled this. We believe administration is attempting to move on extremely quickly, without recognizing and addressing the mental health crisis among college students. This student-made memorial is not placed in a space that is inconvenient for people that need to pass. Please join our cause to have the university place a permanent memorial for this individual that will remain anonymous for privacy out of respect. Whether it is a plaque directly on the building or a surrounding bench, a memorial should NEVER be removed.

I applied to ODU’s online CMHC program starting Spring ‘27 and haven’t gotten a decision back yet. I’m wondering if anyone has an idea of when I could expect to hear something back? There’s no indication of a timeline as far as I’ve seen, but curious what anyone else’s experience has been like!

hello! we’re looking for student feedback and opinions on a ton of things. if you want, please fill this google form and be completely honest. all anonymous!!

This post is not meant to inspire hate or harm on anybody. What I am curious about, is I've seen this reddit kind of blow up recently because of a lot of recent problems. I want to give everybody a platform to air out all of their current grievances against ODU and it's current system. You can take this post down if you want, but you'd only be silencing the voice of the community.

Some questions I have are generally;
- How have the 8 week semesters been panning out for everybody

- Veterans, I've been hearing utilizing your benefits has gotten more difficult recently

- The current admin of ODU seems to be controversial.

I was hoping to offer flowers to the person who passed and leave them outside BAL, but I just received an e-mail that they will be removing offerings later today. Where should I take them so the family receives it?

Hey guys! Does ODU have an art club? I would love to join one, but I can't find anything about one on the Campus Groups app. If there is one, when do they meet and how can I join?

Hi everyone! I’m graduating from ODU this December and applied to the Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s program for Spring 2027.
All of my application materials were submitted on time. I reached out to admissions on October 8th to check on my application status and was told that my application was under review and that I should hear back within the next couple of weeks.
With registration opening November 2nd, I’m curious how this typically works for incoming graduate students who haven’t received an admissions decision yet.
Has anyone been in a similar situation? Is it common to receive an acceptance after registration has already opened?
Just looking for some insight from anyone who’s been through the process. Thanks!

is there anyone who may have extra graduation tickets for the December ceremony

For: rest of Fall 2026 but also taking waitlist patients for Spring 2027. Schedule for Spring is still TBD but should be finalized by the end of the month

Criteria in second photo is for me personally, not for everyone

Please reach out if interested! Make sure you read and understand everything in at least the first image before contacting; there's important info there about appt times and fees

We do not make any money from seeing patients in the clinic as students, so we will never try to upsell you on any products or services that aren't necessary

Hi there, I’m a student Dental Hygienist at Old Dominion University. I’m currently looking for patients who are interested in receiving affordable dental hygiene care at ODU’s Dental Hygiene Care Facility.

Appointments help me complete my clinical requirements for graduation while providing you with thorough, supervised dental hygiene care. If you’re interested in scheduling an appointment or would like more information, please feel free to message me directly!

Feel free to share with anyone who may be interested!

who wanna watch wicker

Has anyone gotten their loans distributed to their accounts yet? I got my grants and that zeroed out and already got sent to my bank but nothing on my loans part yet.

Apologies for the length. I typed this out during my lunch break and it ended up much longer than I had anticipated.

Before I begin, I will preface this by saying that I am not someone privy to everything happening on campus. I am a middling-level employee who happens to be blessed with access to a considerable amount of information, and, while I have made every effort to be as accurate as possible, there is a chance that I will have missed or misremembered details. This is simply my attempt to try and explain why ODU is making such aggressive changes and how it led to the current, seemingly adversarial climate between leadership and its employees and students. I am not here to relitigate the March shooting or the tragedy we’ve endured this past week. Frankly, that is not my place. This is strictly meant to offer some much-needed transparency on the current organizational challenges ODU is facing. This is not meant to be a rant or any kind of vent post about ODU, and I will do my best to stick to the facts that I know or have been provided. 

With that in mind, for starters, let’s lay the foundation here. It’s no secret that universities across the country are struggling right now. There are many reasons for this, but this post isn’t about things like the enrollment cliff or political attacks on education. What matters is this was a problem visibly on the horizon for many years and institutions have been forced to consider ways to handle the situation and how to modernize for a new education landscape - ODU is no exception. This has been a matter of discussion dating at least as far back as President Hemphill’s predecessor, Broderick. ODU’s Board of Visitors identified what they saw as challenges, and the required changes to address those challenges. Broderick, however, for reasons I am not personally privy to, was reticent to implement these changes. Thus, it fell upon his successor, and in many ways what would determine the next President of ODU would be whose proposal for the university’s future the Board liked the most. Naturally, Hemphill’s proposal won out. 

What the Board desired was aggressive, sweeping changes to the university, and Hemphill’s role was to be the architect and face of those changes. It was always understood even from the earliest discussions that this would be a deeply unpopular and unpleasant process, but one that leadership at least deemed necessary for ODU’s longevity. In effect, Hemphill was brought on to be “the bad guy” for these changes and was selected for his willingness and ability to weather the storm both on and off campus.

Thus we come to the Forward Focused Initiative. If that name means nothing to you, on its simplest terms it is the broad plan to reinvent the university by restructuring its workforce, investing in facilities and new institutions to expand the school’s capabilities, expanding ODUGlobal, our remote learning program, and, most controversially, reinventing higher learning with things such as A.I. Tools and 8-Week Course options. It is unclear to me where the Board’s wishes end and Hemphill’s specific vision begins, but understand the two are in lockstep about their necessity either way.

Despite the plan’s current unpopularity, these are not inherently bad ideas on their face. Investing in ODU’s infrastructure, offering variable study programs for students with different study paces/preferences, and, setting aside the broader A.I. debate for this discussion, there are valid use cases for it in certain fields worth pursuing. What has become the real schism point between University Leadership and its students and workers has been the implementation and immediate effects of these changes. As for why that is, I have heard two different sides of this story from people close to the administration versus those on the ground floor and in the spirit of fairness I will provide both. 

To hear Leadership tell it, there were multiple retreats held with the leads of all of the colleges and departments to discuss Forward Focused and to iron out the broad strokes so they can all be on the same page for implementation. It was at these retreats where these people were made aware of the administration’s plans for the university and were given ample advance notice to prepare accordingly. They simply did not. To hear Faculty and Staff tell it, they were told suddenly and with short notice to start creating 8-week variants of their courses and to implement A.I. with no further guidance or support from Leadership on how to do so. Uncertain how to handle these changes, and excluded from the decision making process entirely, they pleaded with the administration to delay or rework these plans. When the admin refused, that ultimately led to the Faculty Senate vote of no confidence against Hemphill in March of this year where these disagreements bled into the public sphere. 

Wherever the truth of this matter lies, the end result is the same: These changes were happening one way or another, and university workers had to scramble to implement them without the time or preparation they needed. There are countless testimonies from the Leadership, Faculty, and Students about the efficacies of these changes so I will not dwell on them. What I will touch on, however, is how this experience has created a frayed relationship between those running ODU and those working it. 

Reinventing a university is incredibly challenging, so everyone at ODU has seen a significant uptick in the scale and complexity of their work. Even prior to Hemphill, ODU ran a lean operation with teams often times smaller than their peer equivalents. It is also no particular secret that ODU salaries are typically lower than its peers and absolutely lower than what you would find in the private sector. Essentially, you have teams that would describe themselves as understaffed, underpaid, and are now told they have to work significantly harder for changes they had no say in. As you might expect, this has led to a massive turnover in university employment, which compounds the issue further as more work is piled onto fewer and fewer employees. There is also a hiring freeze currently in effect. Nominally this is so team leads can look at their departments and determine what roles are essential, but in practice it also means if someone leaves your team, you most likely are not getting a replacement any time soon. Even then, because of the aforementioned salary and work concerns, bringing in new hires has been a consistent challenge for ODU for years.

This core issue is at the heart of the challenges ODU is facing at the moment. If you take each party at their word, you have Leadership who see existential problems that ODU must immediately address and the current climate on campus are the transitional growing pains to something greater for everyone. Whereas Employees are being pushed to and often past the breaking point to implement changes they may or may not believe in with fewer people, fewer resources, and no sense that the administration will address their problems. 

Meanwhile, if you are a student you are caught in the midst of all of this, and if you’re in the thick of it with the rest of us then it’s only right you have an explanation for how we got to this point.

The day after a death occurred during classes at Old Dominion University, campus officials organized trauma and counseling resources while hundreds of students mobilized a walkout to mourn and demand change from the university’s administration.

According to some students who participated in the walkout, there was no single organizer. They answered posts on social media and signs around campus that called for an assembly at 11 a.m. Thursday on the Kaufman Mall. The group later marched about a quarter-mile to the Batten Art & Letters building.

The building had been where someone “affiliated with the university” died Wednesday morning, ODU Police Chief Garrett Shelton said. There have been no official updates detailing the circumstances of the death since Wednesday.

At its peak, there were about 300 participants in the walkout. A petition addressed to university President Brian O. Hemphill was passed around at the event. It included seven demands of the administration, including that the university’s executives treat its campus with respect and take accountability for its various shortcomings. The demands resembled many of the longstanding complaints raised by members of the campus’s faculty.

“At the end of the day, we are not asking for perfection. We understand that the university cannot prevent every tragedy or solve every problem. However, we do expect empathy, effort and a willingness to do better,” read the petition, signed by dozens of students. “We are tired of feeling like we have to push our concerns aside and keep going, regardless of what we are experiencing.”

Brian K. Payne, ODU’s provost, said the administration respects students’ rights to express their concerns.

“Our immediate priority is the well-being of our students, faculty and staff. That’s why we have made counseling and support services available, including walk-in appointments, telehealth options and 24-hour crisis support,” he said, in a statement. “We are committed to understanding their needs and letting them know they are not alone.”

Aidan Wells, a civil engineering sophomore, said he attended the walkout because he was frustrated and mentally exhausted. He had grown disgusted with the college’s subsequent methods of communication thereafter, which he said felt robotic.

“They need to take accountability for what happens,” said Bradie Anderson, a business sophomore.

Sophia Salisbury, a music education freshman, said university communications have come off as insincere lately.

“We’re humans before we’re students,” said Alison Rager, a human resources management freshman. “And somebody died.”

Click the link above to read more.

I went to Leo Online registration, it says I’m already not registered for anything, (??) so there’s no way to drop it. Hopefully that means I won’t have pay for it and can get a refund. 🤷‍♂️

UPDATE: The class is an 8 week class for the 2nd session, but it was NOT listed under “Fall 2026 Second Eight Weeks”, so I didn’t see it. It was listed under the regular “Fall 2026” option.
There should be an easy way to see all the classes one is currently taking, and Add/Drop from there. I don’t understand why ODU makes everything on their websites & online systems so confusing to navigate. It has only gotten worse over time.