The Innis College Orientation planning began, as all great things do: with bread.

The first official Orientation Coordinator (OC for short!) Meeting took place at 3 p.m. over Zoom. Rhea was joining from her grandparents’ place in India and Yash was bringing that Innis spirit live from Innis Residence. The one objective of this meeting was to brainstorm the 2022 Orientation theme. 

We started with a piece of paper that would’ve been completely blank if not for the word Bread written in bright blue ink in the very centre. Slowly, but surely, we started adding words like warm, wholesome, s’mores, mushroom, picnic, campfire, and forest to the page. We saw a theme, emerging out of the muddled mess of cottage-core vibes and camp-related titles that we had somehow penned down. A few weeks later, after some workshopping with our supervisors Madi and Dianthi,  it finally came to us: “InnisTogether: Adventure Awaits”.

Does the conception of the theme stem from somewhat dorky beginnings? Yes, yes it does! But that is what you get when two unapologetic dorks are hired to plan Orientation. 

Once we had our theme down, we moved on to step two: assembling a team. And oh, what a team we assembled. *cue Avengers theme song*

From there, we started thinking about what kind of events we could run, what we could put in the orientation kits, and what our look and logo would be. We would sit for hours in the 3rd floor study room at Innis (our makeshift OC Office that we kind of, sort of, completely took over), and filled notebooks with good (and also VERY terrible) ideas. At one point we even went through archives of the Innis Herald looking for inspiration and wisdom from OCs that came before us. 

This was the first in-person orientation in three years, which we saw as a challenge, a mountain to climb, an adventure to go on. There were high expectations, some from nostalgic fourth year Innisians as well as those that we set for ourselves. 

I (Yash) was also only in my second year, fresh off my own online orientation. I didn’t know any Innis traditions of old. I didn’t even have the cheers memorized until the day before O-Week! I was simultaneously planning and experiencing my own first in-person orientation. 

This and the fact that (besides the fourth years) no one at Innis had seen an in-person orientation gave us a lot of freedom. It gave us the chance to experiment with the events, the kits, and the planning process. We would be setting the standard for orientations to come. This was both a daunting and exhilarating realization. 

Just like that, after two months of planning, ideating, and frantic emailing, it was all coming together.

We started receiving the merch we had ordered, boxes and boxes of tshirts, totes, and beaver pins. We were so excited seeing some tangible proof that our work wasn’t in vain! We were making progress!

August came and things really started ramping up; the meetings became more frequent and the ICSS office started filling up with supplies. This was it, the final stretch.

And then, boom! Just like that, four months had gone by and we were finally, finally, at O-week. 

The night before orientation, we could not sleep. We stayed up in the events room at Innis res, creating roads using paper tape and going through the motions of how registration would run the next morning. 

We knew there would be 400 students coming in to register. But we were not prepared for what 400 people actually looked like. It was insane, controlled chaos: the noise, the chatter, the energy, the excitement. The line of students stretched out into St. George street and our leaders in their purple shirts droned around shouting cheers, hyping everyone up, and getting ready for what was sure to be an intense three days.

We had the campus tours, the board game night, the block party, and the camp games. We had mindfulness, an academic seminar, brunch with professors, a bustling picnic and clubs-fair combination, a movie night, and a concert! We walked to Varsity (on time I might add) adorned in Innis colours, and cheering louder than every other college. We had barbeque and the ‘Creaming Ceremony’ and to top it all off, the beautiful return of in-person Harold’s House!

We even brought back the INNIS COLLEGE BOAT PARTY, a 3 hour semi-formal filled with dinner and dancing on a yacht! With this extra, ‘re-orientation’ event, we wanted to give second and third year students the chance to experience the in-person orientation they never got!

WE HAD PULLED IT OFF! Orientation 2022 was a success. 

So yeah, planning Innis Orientation 2022 was… surreal.

We spent four months coming up with a theme, hiring a team, designing our brand image, ordering merchandise, attending countless trainings and making infinitely many to-do lists that are infinitely long. We carried boxes, attended meetings, hopped on spontaneous calls at 2 a.m., met a ton of people and prepared plans outlining every single meticulous detail for every event during the three day O-Week. We thought about everything that could go right and lost sleep over everything that could go wrong (we know our executive team can relate), trying to anticipate every uncontrollable and unanticipatable contingency. We just really wanted y’all to have a good time!

All those sleepless nights and countless hours culminate in three days of adrenaline-fueled excitement, lost voices, sore feet, and unforgettable memories. As Orientation Coordinator, you’re constantly anxious, constantly problem solving and putting out fires (luckily none of these were literal), double, triple, and quadruple checking your schedules and planners and budget documents. Your office is full of untouched plates piled with food and massive cups full of day old smoothies. You haven’t sat down in hours, you haven’t had a single sip of water, you haven’t spoken to your family in three days, and yet all you’re thinking about is how you’re going to feed 450 students and leaders, with only 125 forks. 

And yet, the absolutely heart-warming, tear-jerking moments littered throughout Orientation make all the stress and exhaustion worth it. 

Those moments when we see students laughing, adding each other on Instagram, making friendship bracelets for each other, or singing bad karaoke together. 

When you can point a camera at the crowd in the bleachers and four hundred people shout and cheer because they’re as excited to be at Orientation as you are and the roar of their voices makes you jump, it blows you away, it overwhelms you and gives you goosebumps and a chill down your spine. Because wow, you didn’t know people could cheer that loud for you or be that excited for something you created. Wow! 

And this video becomes one you can watch over and over again. A moment that will never fail to bring happy tears to your eyes. A moment which you’ll cherish when you’ve long left Innis College. 

When you’re coughing into the megaphone because you’ve been shouting cheers for the past hour and 20 students come out of the crowd with water bottles in their outstretched hands. 

Or when you lose a game of tug-of-war against your co-OC (I’m looking at you Yash) [FOR THE RECORD, YASH WON] with a nasty case of rope burn and an upsetting defeat [can you tell that Rhea wrote this part? LIES AND SLANDER], but you can’t stop laughing because you can hear the first years cheering, screaming, and high-fiving you!

When you’re being smeared with green paint and having hearts drawn on your hands but all the students are lining up to have Innis tattooed on their arms or be doused in green paint too. 

When your own executive team walks menacingly towards you with evil twinkling in their eyes and dollops of whipped cream in their hands, ready to FINALLY get back at you and your co-OC for all those late night meetings and tight deadlines. 

When you walk into Harold’s House to see students sitting on blankets, waving their hands, surrounded by fairy lights, swaying and smiling as someone sings a song they wrote about burning the kitchen down and learning to live on their own.

And when even after Orientation has ended, students come up to you outside lectures and in lines for the food trucks or DM you on Instagram, and say “Thank you for planning Orientation,” or “Sorry for throwing whipped cream at you,” or “How can we find you if we want to chat?”. 

Those moments spent hugging each other, bobbing front and back while sitting on a box cart, shaking hands, writing speeches, singing songs, making way too many ‘that’s what she said’ jokes (it was our coping mechanism, don’t judge!) and dissociating on the floor with your co-OC. Those moments make it all worth it.

That was a tad bit dramatic, we know, but we hope you had as much fun at Orientation as we did planning it. You might not always be first years, but we will always be your Orientation Coordinators.

One more BIG BIG BIG thank you to our exec team; Abir, Angelica, Curtis, Kevin, Lina, Rahul, Sam, Shivani, and Yona all helped us make Orientation the success that it was. Thank you to the incredibly hard working Orientation Leaders who made our incoming class feel welcome and supported.Thank you to the AV Team at Innis College for supporting our events and bringing the vibes.Thank you to the custodian staff! Thank you to Innis Cafe for the great food and warm smiles. Thank you to all the stakeholders at Innis College, you supported and workshopped our programming. Thank you to Madi, Dianthi, and Emma for supporting us through every set-back, every “I’m gonna cry” moment, and for celebrating the wins with us. Thank you Principal Karen Reid and Vice Principal Eva-Lynn Jagoe for welcoming our students and showing off that Innis spirit. Finally, thank you to our incoming class who showed up, who cheered, who kept that energy up, and who made all our efforts and hard work worth it. We could not have done Orientation without you all!

Good luck on your next Adventure! 

Love,

Yash Kumar Singhal and Rhea Sharma Gosain

Your Innis College Orientation Coordinators 4 Ever 🙂