International Student Orientation - "with Gourmet Pizza and Pop!"

On Friday we walked to campus for the International Student Orientation, with food mentioned above. A few members of the Society of Graduate Students special committee for international students gave Power Point presentations about Canada, London, and the history of Western. Here are a few of our favorite lines and highlight moments.

It took place in Middlesex College.



















This guy, whose name escapes me, was from Iran and spoke about how Canadians don't prefer to think of themselves as a Melting Pot, as the Americans do.










The government (a constitutional monarchy) issued the Multiculturalism Act to help keep individual cultural heritages alive inside Canada, as long as they don't interfere with the federal government's goings on. They prefer to consider themselves a Fruit Basket of Immigrants, where all the fruits coexist happily without compromising the individuality of the others.











We learned that the Beaver is Canada's Favorite Animal ("Canada was famous for the fur of many beavers"). If you do a Google image search for "Canadian Beaver," I'm sure you'll see the same cartoon from the power point. He told us that hockey is their favorite sport, and that London is the 10th largest city, which all the Americans seemed to know from reading the Wiki article on London, Ontario.

Then they told us about Western in a segment called "Western: Gateway to the World."












The school motto is Veritas et Utilitas and the university was founded by Isaac Hellmuth, an Anglican Bishop, in 1878 (11 years after Canada became a country).

Like a lot of orientation activities, the last five minutes contained most of the useful information - where to get our ID, bus pass, and International Student ID ("discounts!") - so I was glad we went.