To those looking to do exchange here at Rotman…

Prior to the start of our 1st semester we of course had orientation camp which everyone was invited to- including all of the exchange students. So this was a great way for everyone to get to know each other and our school. However this semester with no camp, I was wondering, “how do the international exchange students here know us non-exchange students and all the fun and exciting stuff we have going on?” Turns out they didn’t.

To my surprise, we have no one in the student body who helps integrate the exchange students into Rotman and Toronto. Nor were there any events to this end either. I love helping out newbies to Canada and making sure they have an awesome time here so I figured I’d just take this responsibility on myself!

This semester we have apprx 8 students here from all over the world. I met one of them the other day and here are some things she told me:
-“Besides the people in our classes and the other people on exchange we haven’t met any of the other Rotman students”
-“It seems like all you guys ever do is study”
-“You have a club for Asian students and another club for sports fans?”
I was shocked….SHOCKED! For those who have read my blog, you can probably appreciate the above perceptions couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So the big lesson here is our school has a loooooooooooooooooong way to go in integrating exchange students into the Rotman community. Apparently other schools do an even worse job than us too. That is bad. If students go back to their home institution feeling like Rotman sucks, how could we ever hope to improve our relationship with those other institutions? So, I am trying to fix this, getting our exchange students connected to our facebook community, events eblasts, etc so they know more about what’s going on and can get involved and have some fun. When they get back home, I want them to tell their friends: “ROTMAN AND TORONTO ARE AWESOME!!!!” I know the 1st semester exchange people thought so and sincerely hope the above is a 1st step to getting our current and future exchange students feeling the same way.