This year, student groups worked to formulate a completely new frosh experience as Ryerson University’s Orientation week was moved online as a part of the university’s COVID-19 closures.
For the first time ever, Ryerson University’s frosh week was moved online as a part of safety precautions to combat the spread of COVID-19. The orientation week, which had been extended from its usual run time of five days to a two weeklong event, took place from Aug. 24 to Sept 7. 2020
The Journalism Course Union is one of the many students’ unions that has had to rework their frosh schedule.
“Usually for frosh we build on what the previous year had and create similar events. When everything went online, we didn’t want to just take events that would’ve traditionally been in person and just do them over Zoom because that isn’t necessarily successful for many events.” said Sahara Mehdi, the Vice President of events for the JCU.
Mehdi explained that this year’s JCU Frosh schedule was built from the ground up instead of recycling the events from previous years.
Emma Moore, the Social Media Lead for the JCU, emphasized how much extra work came with the shift into a virtual orientation setting.
“Had frosh been in person, I probably would have less work to do but because of the online format most of our frosh was based off of social media posts. I spent at least six hours a day monitoring the JCU’s social media making sure participants who had comments, questions or needed help were all tended to,” said Moore.
According to Moore, accessibility is something that the JCU made sure they took into account while planning events. Extra work had to be done to make sure all graphics and content was accessible and inclusive.
“We made sure there was a section in all our sign up forms asking if anyone had accessibility needs. On top of that we make sure to have closed captioning on all our videos in addition to image descriptions and alt text for all the graphics” said Moore.
The Ryerson Communication and Design Society is the student group that facilitates orientation for the entirety of the Faculty of Communication and Design. It was the job of the RCDS to facilitate their own orientation while simultaneously making sure that all the FCAD course unions have what they needed for individual frosh.
“The RCDS was the central hub of planning and execution… Our faculty really lets us take the wheel with what we deliver to students while also directing them to us along the way, so they have that FCAD and RCDS feel” said Amanda Offor, the Vice President of Events for the RCDS.
Offor explained that accessibility and inclusivity are things that were key parts of the planning and execution of all the RCDS events,
“A majority of our events gave students and members the option to let us know if they needed an interpreter or closed captioning in advance. Even if we did not receive any indication of such, we did incorporate closed captions with as many events as we could” explained Offor.
Board members from both the JCU and the RCDS, along with the many other student groups at Ryerson, have put in countless hours and effort into making this year’s virtual orientation just as memorable as the ones preceding it.