After several months of consultation, review, and discussion, the new plan for McGill Orientation and Frosh week was revealed last Thursday. With a new, more unified vision of what orientation should be and certain scheduling changes, Orientation Week aims to be more cohesive, and will connect the academic orientation, formally known as Discover McGill, with the more party-oriented Frosh activities.

Next year, classes will start on Thursday September 1, with move-in day taking place the previous weekend of August 27. In order to fit the traditional orientation week activities into the limited time frame, several changes have been made.

Rez Fest will be held on Sunday August 28, followed by three days of academic orientation until the first day of classes on Thursday. Faculty froshes will begin that Friday and last until Sunday night. On Monday, SSMU-sponsored events will take place.

“[We’re] trying to maintain events as they are, but just showing that there’s a bigger chain that runs through all of it, that this is the orientation week,” said Riley Dalys-Fine, Survey and Report coordinator of the First Year Transition Network in the Office of the Executive Director of Services for Students.

Orientation leaders will lead a group of first-year students for the entire week, rather than for just one portion of the orientation.

Leaders will be selected based on a collective vision of what the faculties, the First-Year Office, and SSMU believe the ideal leader should be and how he or she would handle orientation. Because leaders will be in charge of the same group throughout the entire week, they will be expected to be more well-rounded and better prepared to handle a variety of situations.

“The idea is to give the leaders a little bit more of a mandate,” Dalys-Fine said. He added that there are already many highly committed and mature Frosh leaders and believes that they will be willing to accept more responsibility and thrive under it.

“We believe that they [will] see potential for fun throughout the whole week,” he said. “[We believe] that they’re going to enjoy the whole job.”

Anurag Dhir, coordinator of the First-Year Transition Network and the Community Action Toolkit in the Office of the Executive Director of Services for Students, pointed to the importance of the leaders and coordinators in the success of an event like Frosh.

“It’s the coordinators and the leaders that make this event what it is,” Dhir said. “So if we can support them and empower them to make this event the best that it can be, then I think the students need to take that ownership. But they can’t do it alone, and I think that’s where the administration can come in and provide that support for them, offering resources and tools.”

Tom Fabian, VP Internal of SSMU, agreed with Dalys-Fine, saying that the mentality for frosh leaders needs to be altered.

“We have to get out of the mentality that it’s just a binge drinking opportunity for a bunch of leaders,” Fabian said. “They have the opportunity to be a role model or mentor for the [first-years] for the entire week.”

Fabian also explained that he has been interested in condensing SSMU Frosh into one day for some time.

Fabian said his goals going into this process to decrease the focus on drinking and to ensure that the administration is aware of all orientation ideas throughout the planning process so there won’t be any serious problems during the actual Orientation Week.

Jana Luker, executive director of McGill Student Services, said the administration has been a part of the orientation reimagining process from the beginning, and so far everyone has been pleased with the methods of consultation that have gone into these changes.

“From the administrative perspective, if the students are feeling at the end of it that they’re oriented and better prepared to start university then that’s what matters,” Luker said. He also explained that the administration’s main role in most of the discussions has been to give students a forum for discussion.

Although some of the changes being put into effect are the result of the condensed schedule, others had been in development for many months before the schedule was announced.

“We were still going to be doing this working group anyway,” Dhir said. “But when we found out the schedule was changing, it was a bit of a wrench, but at the same time, I took it as an opportunity, saying, ‘Oh man, now we really have a chance to work with a clean slate, we can actually re-imagine this from the day one.'”