All Posts Tagged With: "freshmen"
The beginning of the end of frosh week
The tragic death of a Queen’s student has renewed calls for a crackdown that is already well under way
Natasha Zapanta, a cheery first-year Queen’s University business student in a perfectly manicured first-week outfit, won’t be telling her grandchildren about any Old School-worthy hijinks. Frosh week for this 17-year-old involved scavenger hunts, a video dance party and “Commerce Cares”—random acts of kindness visited upon unsuspecting fellow students by commerce freshmen. “There was nighttime partying,” she admits, “but we just stayed in the residence hall.” Most of her friends are also 17, below Ontario’s legal drinking age and, while alcohol is readily available, they’ve been warned not to indulge.
For biochemistry major Connor Forbes, the week was so low-key it threatened to dampen that famous Queen’s school spirit altogether. The gloom extended even to the engineering faculty, where students were this year banned from the school’s ancient move-in day tradition, in which engineers paint themselves purple and taunt incoming freshmen. Engineering society president Victoria Pleavin, citing complaints, sent an email to all engineering students warning them that anyone caught engaged in the practice would be escorted off campus. “Move-in day was really an introduction to the fun of the school and gave you a sense of community,” says Forbes. “The event is gone and we don’t know if it’s coming back. They took it away.”
Such moves followed a raft of measures taken by Queen’s administrators aimed at taming the furor surrounding frosh week—and, it seems, everything else too. Last year, the university cancelled its infamously out-of-control homecoming event, which newspapers have become fond of noting cost over $200,000 to police. Queen’s also vowed to curb freshmen excesses by stamping out the likes of “Slosh the Frosh” and “Sauce the Boss” because, according to senate meeting minutes last year, they “put students at risk.” The clampdown is, depending on your politics, already a success. Says John Pierce, interim associate VP and dean of student affairs: “By last Thursday, I was getting reports that, ‘Well—jeez!—frosh is going better than it has before!’ ”
And yet even these stringent measures could not prevent tragedy. Last Monday, Queen’s students on their way to rugby practice discovered the body of Cameron Bruce, an 18-year-old freshman from Connecticut, on the lawn outside his residence, just hours before he was to start classes. The night before, Bruce had attended an engineering banquet—a sort of last hurrah to end engineering frosh week. After dinner, he walked back to residence with friends. What happened next is still shrouded in mystery: police suspect no foul play, and they’re investigating whether alcohol played a role in the incident.
News of the death brought the inevitable newspaper editorial: “Be it the mass drunkenness of Aberdeen Street or young people getting a dubious initiation to booze in peer-pressure-filled orientation activities,” wrote the Kingston Whig-Standard, “the greater community has long quietly wondered: what will it take for Queen’s to do something about this? Does someone have to die?” The incident’s significance was not lost on students: “I think it’s the beginning of the end of frosh week,” one told Maclean’s.
No, actually. It’s the end of frosh, full stop—not just at Queen’s, but everywhere. A generation of children raised in an era so risk-averse that schools ripped seesaws, parallel bars and fireman’s poles from playgrounds has come of age and gone to university. The halcyon days, when freshers set cars and couches ablaze and guzzled beer at university-sanctioned keggers, now grow dim and will soon become distant memories. Many schools have retired the word “frosh” altogether, preferring less festive words like “orientation”; at the University of Ottawa, freshmen are referred to by the tin-eared sobriquet of “101er.” Official first-week events are now mounted sans booze. A handful of U.S. colleges are entirely dry. The University of Guelph this year, for the first time, made residences alcohol-free zones during frosh week. It’s a revolution some students call a “war on fun.”
Hey freshmen, we want your DNA
Incoming students at Berkeley given gene-testing kit
A plan by the University of California, Berkeley to voluntarily test the DNA of incoming freshman has come under fire from critics who said the school was pushing an unproven technology on impressionable students.
The university has said it will send test kits to 5,500 new students to analyze genes that help control the body’s responses to alcohol, dairy products and folic acid. The voluntary tests are intended to spur conversation about the growing field of personal genomics, not predict the likelihood of disease, university officials said Thursday. “We thought that this would be a more engaging vehicle for discussion than having them read a book or an article,” said Mark Schlissel, dean of biology at UC Berkeley.
Critics, however, worry that students could get the idea the school approves of widely available direct-to-consumer gene-testing kits that claim to predict the risk of future health problems, said Jesse Reynolds, a policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics think thank. Students might think, “Berkeley gave it to us. It must be good. UC Berkeley would never be giving its incoming students anything bad or controversial,” Reynolds said.
One such kit was set to go on sale at Walgreen’s pharmacies last week. However, the chain changed its mind after federal regulators said the kit’s manufacturer never submitted the product to the Food and Drug Administration for review, a requirement for medical devices.
University officials said they were careful to choose genes for testing that were not related to serious health issues. “We wanted to pick genes in which the variants were very easy to understand, not threatening, and probably reveal information students have about themselves already,” said Jasper Rine, a UC Berkeley genetics professor who is spearheading the testing program.
The program’s organizers said it was important to get students talking about the issues because genetic testing would likely become an everyday part of medicine in coming decades. A key concern about many direct-to-consumer genetic tests is their reliance on studies that use statistics to determine how likely a particular gene variation is to be connected to a specific disease.
Many such studies are preliminary, but public health officials worry that without proper counselling, consumers are likely to take their test results as definitive. Schlissel said the science behind the tests being given to students was well-grounded in years of research. In addition, students arriving in the fall will be able to attend a presentation of the overall results for the entire incoming class and learn what the results mean.
All DNA will be collected privately, officials said. Students will use a barcode that only they have to locate their individual results, and the university said all DNA will be incinerated after the analysis is completed. Students also will be able to compete to win one of four much more comprehensive personal gene scans from 23andMe Inc., a Google-backed company that has been at the centre of the debate over direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
Dr. Muin J. Khoury, director of the National Office of Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the value of the tests to students will depend on how well the results are presented and discussed. The test for a gene related to how quickly a person absorbs alcohol could easily lead new college students to get the wrong idea, he said. “I just worry about 18-year-old kids saying, ‘Oh, I’m a fast metabolizer, I can drink a lot of alcohol, it won’t affect me.’” Still, said Khoury, “if it’s packaged well, it could be a great experience.”
The Canadian Press
Facebook holds first-years hostage
British college uses Facebook as a retention tool, claims a “significant improvement in retention”
Read the full story at the BBC
Also on Academica’s Top Ten
A knife all blade
How do you remain an idealist in the hard, logical world of academia?
I’ve been thinking a lot about idealism lately. I entered university an idealist, believing a more sustainable and equitable world than the one we currently inhabit is achievable. Over the course my my first three weeks here, my idealism has been consistently challenged by my peers, my professors, even my textbooks, and I find myself scrambling to reconcile what I’m learning with my beliefs and goals.
The challenges have arrived mostly in the form of logical arguments regarding why my idealism is unrealistic, so my attempts at reconciliation have been similarly rooted in logic, which is proving to be very difficult. For example, in discussing whether altruism exists or not, it’s very hard to come up with examples of pure altruism to prove that it does exist, since any seemingly altruistic act ultimately makes you feel good about yourself and is therefore in your self-interest. Logic, it seems, is inadequate to prove that altruism exists.
Similarly, in my Global Governance class, we’ve been discussing the idea of a world government which would legislate and enforce laws for the entire world and would therefore be much better than we are now at dealing with global problems like climate change or terrorism. But, for many practical reasons, the idea is considered overly idealistic and unrealistic: another instance of idealism getting bogged down in logic.
Even despite the seemingly overwhelming logic confronting much of my idealism, when I read great thinkers like Oscar Wilde saying that “a map of the world without Utopia is not worth looking at,” I think it might be worth clinging to.
There’s another quote I like that goes: “a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It cuts the hand that uses it.” I recalled this bit of wisdom from the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore yesterday as I was listening to a monk at a Buddhist temple I was visiting out of interest, and it struck me that perhaps I’ve been overly focused on logic while neglecting intuition. Of course, universities are institutions of logic and reasoning, so my recent trend of over-intellectualizing things is perhaps understandable. At the temple, however, there was much talk of how to live a happy and yes, idealistic life, without logic ever being inferred.
Of course, religions rarely feel impelled to justify their teachings with logic, and yet the teachings certainly manage to resonate with many millions of people. After all, extolling virtues of generosity, peace and love, wisdom, and connectedness to others should hardly need justification, and these are essentially the virtues on which most idealism (most of mine, anyway) is based.
So for now, I think I’ll ignore the dissenting voices of logical pessimism and keep my eyes focused on Wilde’s Utopia, justified (I’m still not totally off logic) with one last quote popularized by the ever-wise Kanye West : “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”
The anthropology of Freshmen
Inexplicable behavior and strange lifestyles develop in the land of Freshmen
The culture that’s been developing over the past couple of weeks would be an anthropologist’s dream. From first years voluntarily chugging blended-up Big-Macs to midnight runs around campus reminding other Colleges why we’re better than them, paranormal behavior is normal here.
It’s somewhat more comprehensible when you remember the context of the situation Freshmen find themselves in. When hundreds of 18 year olds move away from home, to a strange city, with strange people, equally strange social dynamics are bound to develop. The inundation of experiences conspire to form a bubble that surrounds campus: a little world consisting entirely, more or less, of going to class, studying, and socializing.
Even for a relative introvert like myself, it’s extremely easy to find yourself partying every night. I have to remind myself now and then to take some time to myself, to recharge my social batteries and to regain perspective on the bizarre microcosm. Unfortunately, gaining perspective rarely simplifies things. In fact, the opposite seems to be true in my case. When I remember that the main reason I’m going to university is to study and earn a degree, questions inevitably arise as to what I want to study and what I want to do with my degree (no, I haven’t by any means decided yet, and neither have half the people here).
Of course, first year is exploratory, but the courses you choose in first year will limit what you can take in later years. Two days before the last date to change courses, I find myself frantically trying to decide whether or not to keep economics (I hate math but enjoy learning the concepts) and whether I want to take a course that will allow me to major in political science (it looks interesting but is misleadingly unscientific and often degradingly referred to as “soft history”). It’s probably needless stress, because I can always take whatever course I need in later years, but right now it seems unquestionably important. And to an extent, it is important to figure these things out because it allows to form a general idea of the path you want your degree to take.
Next: Tips on choosing courses that are right for you
Crossing the country for freedom
Students moving away for university often cite more freedom as a motivator – but what does this really mean?
I write this post from Tofino, B.C., a small surf town on the beautiful west coast of Vancouver Island. I am on a final family holiday before moving across the country to start university at the end of August. One might reasonably assume that I would seize this opportunity to spend quality time with my dad and younger brother, enjoying their soon-to-be-rare company and our incredible surroundings. And yet, this simply hasn’t been the case.
I find myself almost constantly caught up by thoughts of my impending departure and thus very much removed from the present moment. This absence from the moment necessarily impedes my enjoyment of my family and the experience as a whole; obviously not the best way to spend my final days with them, but perhaps excusable given the relative enormity of the change ahead.
This has all lead me to consider what exactly it is about moving away to university that so excites me (and pretty much every other college-bound friend I know). What, truly, are the differences between living with and without your parents, and why are they so appealing?
The obvious answer, of course, is more freedom, but this too begs further investigation. Freedom to do what? At this point, most somewhat reasonable 18-year-olds I know enjoy the trust of their parents enough that they are allowed to do pretty much everything they want. So again, freedom to do what?
A concept that keeps coming up in discussion with fellow soon-to-be- as well as current university students is a desire to re-invent oneself. Of course, our parents aren’t forbidding us from doing this now, but the freedom that comes with moving away to a place where you don’t know (many) people makes re-inventing oneself a lot easier.
Before I go any further, I think it’s important to clarify that a desire to “re-invent yourself” need not carry a negative association with low self-esteem or an explicit dissatisfaction with your current self. To me, it represents a recognition that any negative behavioral trends or patterns are much easier to correct (at the same time as putting new emphasis on those traits you like) when surrounded with people who don’t already expect you to behave a certain way – and this is a good thing. This is what I think that notion of freedom ultimately means – a fresh start – and this is pretty exciting.
So as the countdown to move-in day begins, I’ll keep this in mind as I try to stay present and enjoy the last days with my family, friends, and old self.
BC government cuts $16 million in education funding
Last-minute cuts incense hundreds of students
It’s understandable that in tough economic times, governments will make funding cuts. The BC government’s latest $16m cut to education funding, however, is completely inexcusable.
Not only is it in clear violation of the BC Liberals’ May election platform promise (p. 26) to “maintain this year’s funding levels for student aid,” but according to BC MLA Gary Coons, “the Campbell government delayed telling students the programs had been cancelled… in order to hide the cuts until after the election.”
Indeed, several students who applied for the March deadlined Premier’s Excellence Award – a $15,000 scholarship awarded to the top high school students in the province – recently telephoned the Ministry of Advanced Education requesting the results of their applications. They were told that the judging process was complete and that the winners would be notified shortly.
When the news came that the scholarship was eliminated, most students, including myself, reasonably assumed that this year’s winners would still receive their awards and that the program would cease to exist next year. Alas, this was not the case.
After several phone calls to various government representatives, it has been confirmed that the program will be eliminated immediately, meaning even those students who applied and were apparently selected as recipients this year are out of luck.
This failure to notify students before they spent hours applying for the scholarship – or at least before they spent months anxiously awaiting the results – has been met with understandable outrage.
Other cuts include eliminating the Nurses Education Bursary at a time when the province is in dire need of more nurses, as well as the:
Permanent Disability Benefits
Debt Reduction in Repayment
BC Loan Reduction for Residential Care Aid and Home Support Worker
Health Care Bursary
Early Childhood Educator Loan Assistance
