Orientation Week’s Wonderful Success
The year 2020 has been fraught with change. Everything at Vic has been affected including the delivery of September’s highly anticipated Orientation Week. The challenge was how to create a sense of place when it is in cyberspace. How does one foster a caring community with hundreds of students who will never physically meet? It took a group of dedicated and innovative team members to re-invent the Orientation Week wheel. From the time-honoured scavenger hunt to the spooky Vic ghost tour, everything had to be re-imagined.
Sarah Clapperton Vic 1T9, orientation and transition intern in the Office of the Dean of Students, says there ended up being many positives to on-line orientation. “The programming was accessible to everyone, no matter where they were in the world. We were also able to record many of the sessions so students could either look back on a session or watch it at their own convenience. This year we also chose to bring back the daily check-ins with transition mentors. This helped make the experience even more personalized than usual. I’m sure we will continue to include this tradition moving forward.”
Between Orientation Week and the more specialized International Student Orientation and Commuter Student Orientation, there were 14 days of synchronous, on-line orientation programming which included 93 events and more than 95 hours of programming. Forty student organizations were featured, including clubs, levies and VUSAC commissions, plus another 30 Vic/U of T student supports, resources and offices/divisions were featured. All told, the programming garnered an impressive 101 161 page views.
Bergita Petro, assistant dean, international and upper-years, was happy to report some noteworthy statistics about the asynchronous and synchronous orientation experiences including: the active engagement of 1142 students through the Vic First-Year Experience Quercus Page and 1053 registrants for Vic’s suite of synchronous, on-line orientation experiences.
In addition to re-imaging events such as discussing movies to discussing mental health, students were afforded even more opportunities to come together and connect thanks to the technology of small break-out rooms and daily check ins. This year also saw the introduction of Vic Talks Anti-Racism, a very well-received, four-panelist discussion on the personal challenges experienced by BIPOC speakers. “I would say the most successful moments of orientation have been the conversations around Black Lives Matter, racism and mental health,” says Kelley Castle, dean of students. “Because of COVID-19 and social restrictions, students are questioning what matters; what matters in our institutions, in our communities and for them as individuals. What is clear for students is these are the issues that matter most: justice, health and community. These are the conversations they are invested in and whose outcomes they are invested in shaping.”
Sarah Derawi, orientation co-chair and current student, says, “This year’s orientation team put their heart and souls into the project. It was so rewarding to see the executive’s hard work translate into success. We have received so much positive feedback from students thanking us for preparing them for life at Vic. It was very lovely to hear that we have successfully given them a solid footing going into University.”
There’s no way of knowing what Orientation Week 2021 will look like but we might well see a hybrid that takes the best of a traditional approach combined with the new lessons learned during a time of Zoom, YouTube Premieres and Quercus.