Many first-year students begin their time at university with the expectation that frosh week is going to be the best week of their university life. For me, this idea quickly proved to be false as Carleton University’s frosh turned dull on the second day.
I didn’t meet my tight clique of friends during frosh and I easily forgot the week. Maybe it had to do with the fact that no one turned up for the events for general frosh, but who could blame them? It’s not a lot of fun to be sitting down on itchy grass watching a stage for a week straight, especially when many frosh events at Carleton happen at the same time as Carleton’s first week of classes.
However, in my experience, engineering and business students have different things to say about frosh week—apparently theirs was actually enjoyable. From white-water rafting to scavenger hunts, the schedule of events for EngFrosh and Sprosh fulfilled the expectations of fall orientation that those students were promised.
Split faculty frosh allows EngFrosh and Sprosh more freedom because of the reduced number of students. Yet with such a large number of students left in the general frosh, Carleton would do well to split it even further, with a separate frosh for the Bachelor of Arts students, the Bachelor of Humanities students, the Bachelor of Science students, and so forth.
Although students coming to Carleton this year will see an improvement in frosh, with a week to enjoy events before classes begin and a trip to Mont Cascades Water Park, they would still benefit from having frosh groups split by faculty. Splitting all frosh groups by program instead of by residence floor makes more sense in the long run. For students pursuing a Bachelor of Arts, for example, there is only one compulsory course in first year, meaning you don’t really meet that many people in your program. But people on your floor? You’re living with them for a year. You’ll definitely have a chance to talk to most of them, even if you aren’t in the same frosh group.
There isn’t a huge opportunity to talk to people in your classes and in your program once school starts (you do have to listen to the professor’s lecture, after all), so split-faculty frosh allows people to establish these academic connections before they walk into the lecture hall. Walking into a massive lecture hall for the first time is scary, but already knowing people in your classes from frosh would make that jump into university life less intimidating.
Carleton frosh sets up a disappointing start to a new chapter of life. In my first year at Carleton, university life picked up after frosh ended—this shouldn’t be the case. As a smaller campus, Carleton may have less of a budget than schools such as Queen’s University or the University of Toronto, but that also means there are fewer kids to organize.
Frosh is meant to make the university feel like home for new students, and Carleton’s current frosh is too big to meet that standard right now. Either frosh improves, or first years will continue to bond over their disappointing orientation week experiences
