Thousands of students, and many for the first time, will be pouring into local universities and colleges over the next days and weeks for an orientation season that one administrator says “never gets old.”
“At the start of the school year, there’s always tremendous excitement, in part because we’re always welcoming a crop of new students who have never been here before,” said University of Manitoba president Michael Benarroch.
“You’re in high school. You’re in a small setting, your teachers are on top of you, they’re asking for assignments — and you come to university and you’re one of now 30,000 students.
“In the next week, you’re going to see a lot of activity on campus, ways in which we’re trying to connect with students to make sure that they have the resources they need, to make sure they understand how universities work.”
It’s all part of the university experience, Ali Wood-Warren of U of M’s student affairs office told Global Winnipeg.
“One of the things that I really hope students can take to heart is that it’s going to take a little bit of time.
“Orientation really is a process. It takes a bit of time. You’re not going to know everything on your first day … and that’s OK. We know that students are learning to be university students, so it’s really important to us to provide those tools.”
Despite the overwhelming experience — especially for those experiencing post-secondary school for the first time at the U of M’s massive campus — more experienced students say it’s a matter of getting the lay of the land and finding where you fit in.
“At the beginning, university is so big, and it was so overwhelming with all these new buildings, these faculties, these offices, and I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged in that,” student Emily Lastra said.
“So going into my second year, I definitely found my sense of where I belonged on campus.”