Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14138255-20170816155108/@comment-26397825-20170819022527

Nikoli the rebel wrote: Getting assigned to dorms, naming, and deciding the names can be done on another day. If we are talking about maximizing the number of huntsmen then initiation should be 2-3 weeks before the students spent their first night at Beacon. Should, but aren't. Everyone moves straight to Beacon, spending a night on the ballroom floor before going through Initiation and being assigned teams that night. There's likely enough time for two Initiations to be run during the day and still have enough time to name the teams and assign dorm rooms, but the way the show has it everything happens on the same day. Additionally, initiation might be the first time some people see a grimm. That is traumatizing and candidates need a little while to figure out if this is what they want to do for the rest of their life. New students could also be accepted in this time frame to fill the spaces from those who failed or dropped out. Considering Ruby, a 15 year old girl, met a pack of Beowolves on Patch, a tiny island off the coast of Vale, I really don't think there's going to be many applicants who haven't seen a Grimm before. And Jaune very obviously hadn't seen a Grimm and yet wasn't given any sort of counselling to deal with the 'trauma', so it seems to me that they employ a more 'sink or swim' approach. The things that require trauma counselling are killing other people such as criminals, or witnessing the death of other people, such as teammates or civilians. Coming up against and fighting a monster when you know that is what the job is about should not require counselling, and I don't see why Beacon would offer it as a first day thing.

If your mental state is so fragile as to have a mental breakdown over the very job you are signing up to do, then you are obviously not cut out to be a Huntsman. Hmmm. I think the missions work like co-ops. Co-ops are where college students spend a semester working in the field. That's nice....but we know all first years go in the second semester. Ozpin gathered the first year students from all Academies in the auditorium and told them "You're about to go on your first missions, which may take you outside the walls." Some of those students were only in Vale for the Vytal Festival, and if they'd only signed up at the beginning of that semester instead of the previous semester, they wouldn't even have the basics down.

So while real life colleges have rolling enrollments and students can decide to start in either semester, Beacon and the other academies appear to operate on a high school enrollment system; you join at the beginning of the year, and go through to the end of the year. None of this "Choose whether you start in spring or autumn" stuff like real life colleges.