The Erindale College Students’ Union is unhappy with how orientation week went at the Mississauga campus. Participation in UTM’s frosh week was unusually low this year, and ECSU says some of the blame has to be taken by UTM Student Affairs.
ECSU Vice-President of Finance Sean O’Connell said that advertising for orientation week was too little, too late.
“What is a serious problem is that when it was advertised, it was advertised through Student Affairs, and I think that led to lower participation,” said O’Connell. “The Web site and the email [to incoming UTM students] was official two weeks before frosh week. When it’s thrown in our face two weeks before our biggest event of the year that students are semi-informed, that’s a problem.”
Mark Overton, dean of Student Affairs at Erindale, says that ECSU hasn’t yet expressed its displeasure to him, and so declined to respond to O’Connell’s charge that UTM Student Affairs dropped the ball on orientation.
However, Overton confirmed that this year Student Affairs and ECSU committed to a joint advertising campaign for orientation week.
“This year it was done by email, so it included academic and ECSU information combined,” said Overton. He said that the two groups had “started talking about an integrated message” early in the summer, but confirmed that emails were sent out to new UTM students in August.
Overton said that email was chosen as the best way to reach the students, “in order to get the message effectively early enough for them to make plans.”
Katherine Kormos, services coordinator at ECSU, wasn’t ready to blame Student Affairs, however.
“UTM this year focused on organizing orientation as a group. In trying to put a mail-out together, it got delayed,” she said, adding, “we’ve been hit by every technical problem known to man,” which included a computer virus and the blackout which hit Ontario and the Northeast U.S. in August. “As for being unhappy with the way Student Affairs ran [the promotions], I can’t say that I myself was,” said Kormos.
O’Connell believes that the message got out too late, however.
“The weekend before [orientation started] we had 950 spots planned, and 310 students signed up. [Participation] dropped almost by half.” The low turnout (it eventually reached 750 participants) has hurt ECSU’s bottom line, although there is little agreement on how much. O’Connell would only say that “right now, in our budget, we are a certain amount less than we expected to be,” but other sources have placed the loss as high as $25,000. O’Connell said that originally the loss had looked to be almost $19,000, but that most of that cost was recovered over the course of orientation week from people who signed up late and other savings. “Because of a few things we were able to change, like bus bookings,” O’Connell said.
Kormos said that “we have made money. There’s no doubt about that. The only thing is we made less than we hoped.”
Overton said that participation in the academic orientation, in contrast to the full orientation week, was higher than it had ever been. Academic orientation took place on one day out of the full five that ECSU ran, and attracted more than a thousand students.
Despite the problems, O’Connell and Kormos both said that the joint promotions scheme was a good idea and would continue in future, with some changes. “The blame could equally be placed with the student union,” said O’Connell. “We should have taken the bull by the horns and done it ourselves.”
