If you’ve enrolled at Dalhousie following the summer after your final year of high school, your parents and elementary school teachers could never have accurately imagined what your first weeks at university would look like.
Around the time your life started, one of Dalhousie’s head staff in Information Services told the school’s Board of Governors that Dal was facing competition in keeping up with technology.
In February 1997, Morven Wilson told the board his department was providing for the “burgeoning desire to include computer-based methods in teaching,” and “the need for near-universal student access to a computer with suitable applications software and connection to the internet”.
By 2014, these desires have been met. Many first-year courses at Dalhousie now feature guided tours of Powerpoint slides as the main method of instruction, and perpetually-connected students juggle watching these slides with attending to smartphone notifications.
Changes are taking place quickly, and it’s easy to lose sight of the past in the face of constant newness in our lives. For example, while Dal’s ads may make it seem like the iconic Henry Hicks Building has always been our base of commands, we’re no longer on the original site of the school. Dalhousie College was founded at Grand Parade Square in downtown Halifax, at the current location of city hall.
For some time after moving to our current campuses, Dal kept its ties with this location.
In September 1989, the Dalhousie Gazette covered a Frosh Week event where the president of the Dalhousie Student Union milked a cow in the square, purportedly in observance of an old bylaw allowing Dalhousie College students the privilege of this activity.
But we don’t milk cows in the square any longer, and now we don’t celebrate Frosh Week, either. Within recent years, Dalhousie isn’t the only school that has moved away from calling its first-week celebrations Frosh Week – this year, Saint Mary’s University is celebrating Welcome Week.
These changes are occurring at universities nationwide to encourage a move away from connotations of alcohol and hazing, and reframe this week as the beginning of a year-long orientation.
Today, everyone is faced with constant orientation – disruptive technologies and precarious working conditions have people and institutions alike constantly working to adapt to new demands. This means finding innovative ways to solve problems, not following a pre-built track like in a certain Game of Life. It means constant orientation, whether we like it or not.
Here at the Gazette, it’s our hope this issue will help you in your orientation – or, for returning students, reacquaintance – with life at Dalhousie. But let’s not let our relationship end there.
We’re excited to be in our 147th volume of serving as the student voice of Dalhousie, and we’d love it if you would join us.
Our contributor meetings are held every week at 6:30 p.m. in room 312 of the Student Union Building, starting September 8.
If you have any interest in reporting, photography, illustration, data or sports – or you’d just like to get more involved in the Dal community – please drop by. We serve free pizza and welcome all students.
For now, enjoy your orientation – it never ends.
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