Bonding With Beepers

Three days before Memorial Day, Gina Semenza’s pager went off as she was preparing for her final exams at Bishop Montgomery High School.

She looked down at her pager to find a message: “Have a great holiday weekend.”

The message came from Loyola Marymount University, where 18-year-old Semenza will begin her freshman year in August.

The holiday greeting was the first of several messages the university expects to send members of its incoming freshman class throughout the summer.

In an effort to combat the impersonalization of college culture and its bureaucratic image, Loyola Marymount officials have sent pagers to each of the university’s 1,000 incoming freshman. Students will have free use of the alphanumeric pagers until classes begin in August. Afterward, they have the option of keeping their pagers at a discounted rate.

“It would permit student anxiety to be less and allow technology to take hold,” said Joseph Merante, associate vice president for academic affairs at the university. “It continues that personal connection to us.”

The university will send students information about scholarship opportunities, health insurance and parking rules as well as reminders to prepare for placement exams.

Some of the messages will be sent to the class as a whole. Others will be tailor-made to specific groups or students. An upcoming message will tell each student who his or her roommate will be. During the June orientation, students will get others’ pager numbers and be able to page one another as well.

Students could get as many as seven messages a week from the university.

Merante came up with the idea as he was searching for a way to maintain contact with students during the six weeks between orientation and the beginning of classes.

“A lot of time goes by before school starts,” he said. “This way, they don’t have to wonder if we forgot about them. Rather than them having six weeks of silence, we thought we’d send them a pager.”

Students said they were surprised by the move. “I guess I don’t feel forgotten,” said Matthew Sanford, an 18-year-old from Santa Clara who will be enrolled in the university’s business school.

Some call the technological onslaught of pagers at Loyola Marymount a marketing ploy--each pager has a sticker on it that says “LMU and You”--to keep students interested in the university and possibly persuade others to apply.

“My first thought was that it was kind of a gimmick, a new way of grabbing their attention,” said David Killoran, an English professor. Now, Killoran says, he sees the pagers as a way to facilitate communication between students and administrators.

“Some schools give out sweatshirts,” said Julian Matossian, an 18-year-old from Encino. “I guess LMU’s way is giving out pagers.”

Pagers are nothing new to most students. State law prohibits them from using any electronic signaling devices on public school campuses, but many teenagers nevertheless carry their own pagers and cellular phones.

Sanford has had his own pager for a year. “It’s not that big a deal to me,” he said.

By the time they reach college, students like Sanford are already comfortable with the technology. The university’s pager system is a simple way of communicating with students in a method that most of them already know, Merante said.

The pagers beep every time the university sends a message, which can be done via Metrocall’s World Wide Web page. They also feature e-mail and Web site accessibility, plus news, sports and entertainment updates.

“I was looking through it and it was telling me how much ‘Star Wars’ made this weekend,” Semenza said.

Semenza, a Gardena resident who plans to major in political science, said she was startled to receive a notice that she would be receiving a pager.

“It may be a little gimmicky, but it works,” she said.

The pagers got mixed reviews from a few students. Getting a list of the top 10 songs in the country was a little weird, said Peter Hoffman, an 18-year-old from Los Angeles who plans to study marketing.

Yet a few of the college-bound students searched for a deeper meaning in the university’s use of pagers.

The university is trying “to promote . . . a family setting and a utopian society,” Matossian said. The pagers help because they foster the feeling that “you’re not alone in college.”