For many students going off to university for the first time means enjoying independence, but they also want to introduce their families to the place they spend much of their waking hours.
As a result, the University of Toronto organised the first ‘Bring Your Family to School’ day on November the 6th. Staff from student life, alumni affairs and the family care office planned the day’s events.
Deanne Fisher, director of student life, said it’s an opportunity for students and their families and student parents to gain new insight into the student’s environment.
“It’s not about parents letting go of the students, it’s about them understanding more about what their son or daughter is experiencing,” she said. “We want families to be part of our student support network. We know from some of our surveys that the students’ primary source of advice is their families, so if we have informed families they can give better advice.”
For Anjana Jacob, a first-year International Relations student who immigrated from Pakistan with her family just two years ago, bringing her family to campus was a way to get them involved in her first Canadian academic experience.
“It’s an open opportunity. I’m the first to go to university from my family, I wanted my parents to see the university,” said Jacob.
“It’s a great thing to have this and we can see where our children go to study and a chance to meet people including some faculty,” said Anjana’s mother, Affia Jacob.
Fisher said the event was a culmination of initiatives begun by the president’s office in order to build relationships with families and parents.
“Increasingly over the past year the president had asked us to begin to look at ways to develop relationships with parents and family members of our undergraduate students,” she said. “The president sends a letter home to families of our students, we have an e-newsletter that gets sent home to families of students, we have a website specifically for parents and family members and now this is the evolution of our relationship development to actually have a university-wide event for our family members to get a taste of the university.”
The event included a welcome a by President David Naylor and a special lecture by Professor Molly Shoichet of chemical engineering and applied chemistry entitled Where Engineering Meets Medicine: Delivering the Promise of Regenerative Medicine.
For Natalie Antonowicz, a fourth-year political science student, bringing her mother and her brother to campus was the best way to give her brother David, a high school student, the opportunity to check out her university as well.
“It’s a good idea to open them up to what I’m doing and have them see what I’m doing for so many hours a day. I also think it’s a great thing for perspective students like my brother to check it out and something like getting a lecture from a professor, that’s a rare opportunity and not something that’s typically offered in a regular tour of the university. It will help him to frame a better decision and to see what U of T is like.”
Original story written by Anjum Nayyar