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It might be the biggest and loudest moving day you’ve ever seen.
As expected on the final weekend of every August, you don’t have to look for long to see a rented cube van or a pickup truck with a mattress strapped in the back puttering down the Queensway
By the time those family vehicles reach Carleton University, hundreds of screaming hooligans greet them, chanting at the door — “Pop that trunk! Pop that trunk!” — and grabbing armfuls of personal belongings to help all those first-year university kids and their presumably spooked parents.
It’s quite the sight. Swarms of young adults, colour-coded by their major — blues, purples, pinks, reds, limes — dressed in bandanas and cowboy hats, parachute pants and booty shorts, cut-off shirts and fanny packs, dancing to booming sing-along pop tunes, whisking their new schoolmates into a first taste of campus culture: “One of us. One of us. One of us.”
One young man hauls only a hefty 60-pack of Molson Canadian — where do you even buy that? — perhaps the single item in his personal inventory that he won’t let anyone else get their hands on.
The first days of university are like a kids’ summer camp on a hyper-caffeinated sugar-blast. It’s the honeymoon period, before they’re crushed by the weight of all those unopened textbooks, before they meet that one professor or that one kid at the front of the class who they just hate so much.
The first year of university can suck.
So happy helpers at Carleton’s great big fun move-in extravaganza are there to give the newbies a grand inauguration, to help them make some friends without necessarily having to flop-sweat their way through an awkward introduction.
“The whole idea is to get them comfortable with campus life now that they’re away from home,” says Reinis Kalnins, 23, a fifth-year engineering student who’s dyed purple — as per tradition for engineering froshers — wearing a black helmet with chainmail made of tabs from beer or soda cans.
So, the sophomores and the juniors and the seniors flood the curb outside residence and pump up the excitement for the freshmen and freshwomen.
(It’s also a good way to get a hundred-million minivans quickly unpacked and out of the way to make room for the other hundred-million minivans still to come.)
“It’s like a giant ‘Welcome to your new home. This is your new family,’” said Emily Dyer, a new biology student who first arrived at Carleton on Sunday.
The scene isn’t the same as how it was when Alan Spence first arrived at university years ago.
“It wasn’t what I was expecting,” said the 53-year-old father who had come from Toronto to drop off his daughter. “It certainly wasn’t like when I was moving into university. There were a few people there, but there wasn’t a huge crowd like this. But I think it’s nice that everyone’s excited and getting the kids ready to come into the school and be a part of residence life.”
So now frosh will begin, and things will jump up another dozen notches.
Godspeed, university kids. Be wild and free, you crazy animals.
afeibel@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/adamfeibel
查看原文...
As expected on the final weekend of every August, you don’t have to look for long to see a rented cube van or a pickup truck with a mattress strapped in the back puttering down the Queensway
By the time those family vehicles reach Carleton University, hundreds of screaming hooligans greet them, chanting at the door — “Pop that trunk! Pop that trunk!” — and grabbing armfuls of personal belongings to help all those first-year university kids and their presumably spooked parents.
It’s quite the sight. Swarms of young adults, colour-coded by their major — blues, purples, pinks, reds, limes — dressed in bandanas and cowboy hats, parachute pants and booty shorts, cut-off shirts and fanny packs, dancing to booming sing-along pop tunes, whisking their new schoolmates into a first taste of campus culture: “One of us. One of us. One of us.”
One young man hauls only a hefty 60-pack of Molson Canadian — where do you even buy that? — perhaps the single item in his personal inventory that he won’t let anyone else get their hands on.
The first days of university are like a kids’ summer camp on a hyper-caffeinated sugar-blast. It’s the honeymoon period, before they’re crushed by the weight of all those unopened textbooks, before they meet that one professor or that one kid at the front of the class who they just hate so much.
The first year of university can suck.
So happy helpers at Carleton’s great big fun move-in extravaganza are there to give the newbies a grand inauguration, to help them make some friends without necessarily having to flop-sweat their way through an awkward introduction.
“The whole idea is to get them comfortable with campus life now that they’re away from home,” says Reinis Kalnins, 23, a fifth-year engineering student who’s dyed purple — as per tradition for engineering froshers — wearing a black helmet with chainmail made of tabs from beer or soda cans.
So, the sophomores and the juniors and the seniors flood the curb outside residence and pump up the excitement for the freshmen and freshwomen.
(It’s also a good way to get a hundred-million minivans quickly unpacked and out of the way to make room for the other hundred-million minivans still to come.)
“It’s like a giant ‘Welcome to your new home. This is your new family,’” said Emily Dyer, a new biology student who first arrived at Carleton on Sunday.
The scene isn’t the same as how it was when Alan Spence first arrived at university years ago.
“It wasn’t what I was expecting,” said the 53-year-old father who had come from Toronto to drop off his daughter. “It certainly wasn’t like when I was moving into university. There were a few people there, but there wasn’t a huge crowd like this. But I think it’s nice that everyone’s excited and getting the kids ready to come into the school and be a part of residence life.”
So now frosh will begin, and things will jump up another dozen notches.
Godspeed, university kids. Be wild and free, you crazy animals.
afeibel@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/adamfeibel
查看原文...
