Sunday- Shiney Happy People

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We were awoken at a ridiculous time Sunday morning, by the reps shouting and banging on our door. We all dressed in our purple Bates t-shirts and they took us all down to the student centre where I had my first Canadian pancakes. Having been told by far too many people that Canadian pancakes are the nicest in the world I was pretty excited. They were obviously nothing like “real” pancakes; they were too small and too fat, plus it wasn’t Shrove Tuesday, but after loading them up with fruit and cream and avoiding the maple syrup at all costs, I dug in. They were delicious, there’s no denying it (although to be absolutely honest, I prefer my mum’s).

Welcome to Cheer Camp

Having eaten, we all returned to Bates where we were split up into our floors. We were then put through what can only be described as cheerleader boot camp. There were 3 rigorous training sections, intent to brain wash us into the Bates cult. In section 1 we bonded with everyone else on our floor and floor 2 via some bizarre (though rather funny) kids-club type ice breaker games. Section 2; Identity. Here we learnt numerous Bates cheers which we were to yell at groups from other halls until they shut up. They ranged from generic we’re-better-than-you type cheers: “B-A-T-E-S don’t get mad ‘cause we’re the best”, to ones pointing out exactly why we were the best. Now all the residences are pretty similar to each other so some of the latter cheers were stretching it a bit, however we did have an advantage over most of the other halls and “We’ve got kitchens” always seemed to clench it for us. Finally we learnt the Bates dance routine (think big fish little fish but based around an airplane). I still have absolutely no idea why we learnt this but whenever I hear Chris Brown I always start the first few moves without realising it. Which can be kind of embarrassing if you start miming checking boarding passes and putting up luggage, whilst in the middle of the supermarket…

I Can’t Hear You

After lunch we headed off to watch a play about being a new student at McMaster and some of the problems we might encounter. Whist waiting outside for the previous groups to leave, we encountered Matthew’s hall; our arch-nemesis (apparently). As we locked eyes both groups went silent for 2seconds. We could feel the tension building. Our first cheer-off was about to begin. All our hard work at boot camp that morning had been leading up to this moment. Could we out-shout them? We surveyed the swarm of brown t-shirts standing in front of us. They had about 20 times as many people as we did, and they were all 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide with lungs the sizes of small sheep (well ok perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration but there were defiantly more of them). It was like Blues vs Villa, Liverpool vs Everton, Leeds vs well anyone really; you could cut the atmosphere with a sharp spoon. Suddenly, from somewhere in the back of our crowd someone screamed “Fire it up!” “Fire it up!” we all yelled back, and the bedlam began. Now I must admit I’ve never actually stood in a building whilst it was being blown up, but I doubt it could possibly have been louder than standing between 1,000 screaming 18 year olds, high on sunshine and maple syrup all individually trying to be louder than the 500 people standing in front of them. The final cheer of a cheer-off is always the same, with everyone constantly yelling “We’ve got more” and jumping up and down at each other until the other group back down. This time round, this bit lasted over 20 minutes. If anyone from Strepsils happens to reading this, you seriously might want to consider getting in on this.

1. We are from Mac

That evening we had the official welcome week launch. This meant all the halls congregating together, first of all outside of the sports field. This obviously lead to more cheer-offs only this time there were 10 halls against each other. My ears are still ringing 2 weeks later. Each hall then ran onto the pitch one at a time, and stood together in a designated area. They then released a balloon with a camera on, which took a picture of us from the sky. It turns out that we were standing the shape of the numbers 2012; the year this year’s first years will graduate. Following this, we played some more ice breaker games. The aim, we were told, was to meet everyone in the 1st year. And I think I almost did. We did various activities like finding everyone who was born in the same month as us; holding up a thumb or little finger and finding 2 more people with the same; or shaking hands with everyone you met in 60seconds.

This is not a university for the shy or quiet!

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