Resources for faculty, librarians and staff

U of T is experiencing its biggest back to school ever, as we welcome thousands of upper-year students who have had few or no in-person courses since spring 2020, in addition to the usual first-year class.  

In response, the University has rolled out the welcome mat for our community with new banners, signs and a range of in-person activities. Organizers have seen record rates of participation in events as students seek opportunities to form community, and, as one organizer noted, “simply enjoy each other’s company.”

UTSC

At U of T’s Scarborough campus, more than 1,500 students attended the Welcome Day event and over 200 participated in student club fairs. The UTSC International Student Centre fielded 1,700 inquiries in September and fed close to 600 students at its Welcome BBQ.

St. George

At the St. George campus, AskMe Anything booths responded to a record 5,000 questions in their first week, and 511 students attended the welcome event at the Centre for International Experience — an increase of almost 50 per cent from 2019. Approximately 1,400 students came to the Exam Centre to attend the Career Fair with nearly 1,000 more participating virtually — a combined total that is double the number from a year ago.

At Hart House, close to 900 tickets were distributed to its annual open house BBQ. Even after the BBQ sold out, students stayed to play games, earn prizes, make crafts and buy plants at the Hart House Student Farm Committee Plant Sale. The first 5-Buck Lunch of the term at Hart House on Sept. 27 also sold all of its 400 tickets, up from an average pre-pandemic showing of between 250 and 350 participants.

UTM

At University of Toronto Mississauga, over 3,100 new UTM students participated in one or more pre-arrival or orientation programs. These included specialized offerings such as Black Excellence Orientation and Queer Orientation as well as ongoing pre-arrival summer programs like EagleConnect and EagleOrientation. The orientation program for parents and families had over 1,200 attendees in person and virtually.

Students have also participated in tri-campus training sessions in greater numbers. The Sexual Violence Prevention & Support Centre saw record numbers of students participate in its consent training and, in August and September, the number of lab users who took online lab safety training increased by 75 per cent to 2,880 from 1,641 in the same period last year.

The University also welcomed members of our community with online resources. More than 20 videos were produced to introduce students to campus and to highlight U of T’s beautiful places and spaces. To date, these videos have been watched 1.2 million times. Also online, the UTogether website has helped connect our community to key on-campus resources. More than 162,000 people used the interactive online campus maps during the back-to-school period, accessing them 400,000 times, with the heaviest traffic on the first day of school and the first Monday back.  

This strong community engagement was also seen on social media, where our #UofTBackToSchool and #UTogether hashtags were used on more than 2,000 times and reached 1.3 million people. 

Throughout the fall, community members who use the #UTogether hashtag on social media will have a chance to be featured on the UTogether site. In the coming weeks, the University’s first-ever tri-campus social media scavenger hunt will be launched, encouraging further campus exploration and providing an opportunity to win a U of T Defy Gravity prize pack.