Reflecting on a week of fun, food, and new friendships
Hi 1Ls. It’s us! Your orientation leaders! Remember us? From 3 weeks ago?
While you’re settling into your first month of law school, we figured now was as good a time as any to reflect on our orientation experience together (a simpler time before 100-page criminal law readings).
We started the first day with our welcome presentation, where we got a chance to see how you all were feeling about the year. It was great to see a diverse array of expectations and goals for the year, even if some of them were slightly too scandalous to be reproduced here. After your law school tours, we hope you enjoyed the opportunity to have a more informal chat with some upper-years. This is where you were able to get answers to some of your burning questions like “How much should I be studying?”, “Which clubs should I join?”, and “Are U of T law students really as evil as I’ve heard?”. The answer to that last one is “It depends,” by the way.
Next up, we had the first of many post-lecture snacks. The 15 cases of Bubly may have been slight overkill, but, in our opinion, it’s better to overdo it than underdo it (could you imagine having too little Bubly?). The first big event of the week was the Blue Jays bingo on Wednesday, August 21. Plenty of prizes were given out following a tense evening of Bingo and the occasional Kahoot for a free space on the card! That led us into the Blue Jays game on Thursday night—the Jays ended up winning a thrilling game against the Los Angeles Angels. Friday’s Amazing Race was an incredibly competitive contest with our winning team sprinting across the finish line mere seconds before the second place team. While only the first place team got our highly prestigious prize of freezies, we hope the rest of you are making use of your wireless chargers!
Over the weekend, we visited Trinity Bellwoods for a day of outdoor games, conversation, and lounging in the sun. Plenty of you took part in the day’s detours to the AGO, Kensington Market, and Prenup Pub. Starting August 26, our second week kicked off with Trivia Night hosted by Jeopardy Champion Professor Niblett. We thank Professor Niblett for hosting an entertaining (and rather difficult) night of trivia. Our last event before your Legal Methods exam was Games Night, where folks came out to play a variety of board games, drink even more Bubly, and test their luck in our raffles.
Our final day together was a long one. We hope you followed our advice about not stressing about the pass/fail Legal Methods exam (seriously folks, it was never that serious). If you didn’t, we hope that the free ice cream at the outdoor celebration took some of the edge off. We capped off orientation with a mixer at the Peter Triantos Gallery. We loved to see so many of you come out and let loose in that final liminal space between orientation and all of the upcoming trials, tribulations, and successes of “real” law school. For us, not only was this our first experience with birthday cake flavoured sparkling water, but it was also a bittersweet moment. It marked the end of our short two-week journey together.
It was a pleasure to welcome all of you (and there were a lot of you this year) to the U of T Law school community. We got to meet so many of you and can safely say that U of T Law is in good hands. We hope you enjoy the next three or more years here as much as we enjoyed putting on orientation for you all. Good luck and don’t forget us!
