Douglas’ Frosh weekend is back for round three
By Angela Espinoza, News Editor
Frosh weekend is returning to Douglas for its third year this September 4 and running until September 6. Since Frosh’s introduction by Campus Life in 2012, DougLife has continued organizing and preparing each Frosh to be bigger and better than the last.
“Typically Frosh is meant to provide a good opportunity for new students to meet other new students on campus,” says Campus Life’s events, communications, and marketing coordinator Chris Raeside. “A lot of [students are] in closed programs, so they don’t get that opportunity very often.
“If they’re coming from a completely different atmosphere, it’s a great opportunity for them to find out about the campus and meet other people and get to build the relationships on campus that’ll make their time [at Douglas] that much better moving forward.”
Each Frosh offers a number of indoor and outdoor events for students to partake in. Students are separated into different teams and proceed to compete against each other for various prizes—and for fun.
“We usually try for physically challenging activities as well as mentally challenging activities, just to try and diversify between… [students’] different strengths. Typically it usually ends up being a little messy, fun, and all the activities focus on s0me sort of team bonding in one way or another.”
Raeside and DougLife’s marketing and promotions assistant Aran Armutlu didn’t want to reveal all their Frosh surprise activities, but they were happy to discuss some of their more annual events. One such activity will be volleyball, which Raeside suggests may have a “pros versus [average] joes” competition. Another one of their annual events is Jeopardy.
“Jeopardy’s a good [event] to have because it’s nice to take a little break from all the physical stuff that’s going on throughout all the day,” says Armutlu. “It’s that game where people’s specializations come out.”
“On the [Douglas Students’ Union’s] end … we usually do a big banner; the banner’s 10-feet by 4-feet tall,” says Raeside. “So every year the teams come in and one by one they actually draw and design and create their own art… on the banner. By the end we get a large banner that basically … ends up being quite unique and artistic, with the Frosh logo in the [centre].”
Another aspect of Frosh that Raeside and Armutlu were passionate about is how other Douglas campus groups get involved. “We bring a lot of different parts of the Douglas community together … and [Frosh is] also good because then new students get to see all the things that Douglas gets to offer,” says Armutlu.
“We’ve had all these different departments involved for the last three years … we’ve worked with the DSU and the [Office for New Students],” says Raeside. “This year we’re also bringing in the Learning Centre, so they’re going to run the Jeopardy—because we figured who better to run Jeopardy than them?”
As Douglas’ student body has grown each year, so has the number of Frosh attendees. “Every year we’re seeing more registrations and more people coming out,” says Raeside.
In addition to Frosh attendees, Raeside stated that each year more students sign up to volunteer—either as new students or returning for team leader positions.
“General volunteers … typically participate in any number of ways, but they’re basically helping making sure the event … goes smoothly. [Frosh] is a very intensive thing to put on so all the help we get from them is much appreciated.
“Team leaders are, not always, but a lot of the time they’re students who participated in the past … but the great thing about the team leaders is it gives them an opportunity to fine tune and hone … [their] leadership skills.
“[Team leaders] need to believe in what we do, and that’s obviously that there are opportunities outside of the classroom to meet other people, to learn about what [those opportunities] have to offer, and to learn about themselves.”
If you’re interested in volunteering for Frosh 2014, you can visit short link http://goo.gl/5sl8ny to sign up.
