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.

So many activities!!!

Week 2 left me feeling a lot like Will Ferrell in Step Brothers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpCk1VWGAI

SO MANY ACTIVITIES!!

We had the Clubs Fair and International Fair this week which left me quite overstimulated. There are so many cool things you can get involved in on campus I really didn’t know where to start! As it stands, I joined the following clubs:

-Management Consulting Association (they apparently have the toughest job interviews so I figure if I can learn how to succeed in a consulting interview, surely I can succeed in any other)

-Marketing Association (for obvious reasons)

-Latin American Business Club (Spanish is one of my life obsessions, so this was a must)

-Business & Technology Group (to get even better connected with the tech space, one of my other huge interests)

-Entertainment & Media Association (An industry I find incredibly fascinating and would love to learn more about on the biz side)

-Rotman Sports Business Club (another industry I’d like to learn more about)

I am probably not going to be able to do everything in every club- probably focus more on 1 or 2 clubs than the rest as the year goes on- but I figure at least by being a member of all, I can go to the events that interest me.

For international opportunities, Rotman has a few really cool things going on:

-Exchange programs with all of the top schools outside North America

-“International study tours” to India, China, Latin America and Europe. These are basically 2 weeks trips to any of these regions where you visit some of the major companies of the region, learn about business practices there, culture, etc. Obviously, I will be applying to go on the Latin America one. ;-)

On the academic side, the workload is as crazy as ever. I can’t believe it has only been 2 weeks. It feels like a semester has gone by already!! The pace is just so incredibly fast that planning (for me anyways) is incredibly important. I have settled into a pretty good routine although that will most definitely change when:

A) clubs activities get into full swing

B) I am faced with our killer exam sched: 5 exams in 6 days Oct 16-21. Hopefully I am still alive and/or still a student at rotman come Oct 22 hahaha