Hold the beer: how university O-Week swapped parties and pranks for picnics and friendship bracelets
Couch burning. Tricycle races. Beerskolling marathons. For decades, orientation week – or O-Week – has gone hand in hand with boozing to unhealthy excess and residential college hazing.
But with drinking rates on the decline, especially among young people – and a cultural shift towards calling out poor behaviour – the orientation to tertiary life has become a much more wholesome affair.
At the University of Sydney’s Welcome Week on Tuesday, undergraduate students make friendship bracelets beside snaking lines of enthusiastic youth waiting for sponsored products.
Sascha Zarins, Sophia Duncan and Charley Bertwistle are seeking four things at orientation – “meeting people, joining societies, networking and getting free stuff”.
The trio met here and are buzzing to socialise.
“We joined the Random Acts of Kindness Club and the Ski Club,” Zarins says. “I’ve never skied before but thought, why not join?”
Coming from interstate, Zarins says orientation is crucial to “not be lonely in Sydney”. While drinking is still “a big part” of the week, this is the time to make lifelong friends.
As the students speak to Guardian Australia, a neon yellow wacky-inflatable-arm-man swings in the breeze, while pounding music emanates from a Red Bull-sponsored DJ.
The only whiff of alcohol is the complimentary strawberry cruiser baseball caps. Instead, soon-to-be students drink free iced coffee on beanbags and take selfies while snacking on Zooper Dooper icy poles.
The trend away from high-profile parties is being felt sector-wide.
Until 2020 the Australian National University’s O-Week was renowned for its Burgmann College toga party – believed to be the largest party at a university residence in the southern hemisphere.
Now ANU’s 2024 program is dominated by library tours, yoga sessions and craft activities.
Similarly, Monash University in Melbourne has shed its “Green Week” reputation that ran well into the 2000s and revolved around “the Centurion”, as the VB cans are known. The challenge involved drinking 100 shots of beer in 50 minutes. If you vomited, you had to drink it.
This year the university is expecting almost 2,000 students to attend its new undergraduate program “Jump Start”, aiming to “foster confidence and enthusiasm” among newcomers – including the second year of its pride march.
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The End Rape on Campus founder, Sharna Bremner, says the cultural shift has been driven by students more than universities. “Students are planning different events where drinking doesn’t feature as heavily,” she says.
“It’s still there – but there are greater attempts to arrange more inclusive events – and young people have confidence now in calling out inappropriate behaviour. They aren’t buying into it.”
Still, Bremner says, O-Week brings a heightened risk of sexual violence. Elizabeth Broderick’s report into sexual misconduct at University of Sydney colleges, released in 2016, found one in eight attempted or completed sexual assaults at the University of Sydney occurred during O-Week.
“You have more young people gathering together and often, it’s their first time away from home,” Bremner says. “Crisis centres don’t need a calendar to know when O-Week is on – they get a spike in calls from university students.”
‘You feel seen and acknowledged’
The president of the University of Sydney Union, Naz Sharifi, has noticed a huge shift since starting on campus six years ago.
A refugee from Afghanistan, she was the first in her family to attend university, and remembers feeling overstimulated by the chaos of crowds. “I didn’t know anyone, I got lost and just felt overwhelmed,” she says.
Since then Sharifi has noticed a huge uptick in diversity and inclusion, largely due to having a seat at the table. That’s particularly important with today’s influx of international students who are new to the community.
“Students feeling daunted by feeling completely different see a club from a similar background to theirs … and find their community,” she says.
“You feel seen and acknowledged. We still have parties, but for me it was inaccessible for someone that doesn’t drink. That cultural shift means community can be built outside those settings, through picnics, conversation.”
Orientation has diversified as campus cohorts shift, according to the University of Sydney archives, but the idea of an introduction to tertiary education is relatively new.
The first institutions to adopt the occasion were Boston and Harvard in 1888, followed by Oxford and Cambridge five decades later.
In Australia, the University of Sydney was the first to celebrate an orientation course for new students in 1946, backed by the students representative council.
Julia Horne, a professor of history at the University of Sydney, says the timing was no accident. It coincided with the end of the second world war, when there was concern over the larger volume of students and how they would settle in.
“The original proposal was three to four weeks of lectures and seminars on how to study – it was pretty intense,” she says. “By the 1960s, it became like a festival or a fair. University can be so disorientating – it was a time to bring lightness and oddity.”
She points to a University of New South Wales tradition of “the wizard”, a man who would dress up in a wizard gown and hat and wander campus, to the delight of the vice-chancellor, and a boom of stalls and concerts.
Pranks and parties were the cornerstone of the University of Melbourne’s orientation events when they began in the 1960s.
In one Ormond College tale, a student took a peak-hour train trip while a “bevy of attendants dressed, shaved and served him breakfast”. Nowadays, it has become more formal and corporatised, with more than 200 official events and partners.
Horne says there has been a broader refocus towards the concept of “welcome” rather than orientation. At the University of Sydney, O-Week was rebranded as Welcome Week in 2019.
“For many students, it may be the only time in their life they see a vicechancellor or a dean,” Horne says.
“As you walk through the tents, student clubs show how universities are made up of enormous numbers of communities, reflecting what the student population is like in that time.
“Historically, O-Week is a snapshot of how students see themselves.”
At the University of Sydney, clubs range from Women and Diverse Genders in Maths to Indian Law Students and the University Network for Influencers and Creators.
There are the age-old political clubs (the Liberals tent proudly displays a T-shirt reading “I survived university without becoming a leftie”) and the quirky clubs – including the inaugural Real and Natural Gingers Appreciation Society and The Taylor Swift Society (USYD’s Version).
Others can be a lifelong haven. The president of Queer Stem, Arnav Gupta, says their rainbow flag at Welcome Week isn’t about ticking a diversity box, it’s about their presence and what that means to new undergraduate students.
They run the classic “fun social things” – parties and pub crawls, but also academic seminars and study sessions. In two days at Welcome Week, they had already amassed 60 new members.
“Sometimes it’s hard to find a space within academia for queer students,” they say. “Our main goal is advocacy and bonding.”
As students wrap up at the University of Sydney for the day and file on to city streets, they can be identified by waves of Commonwealth Bank-sponsored tote bags, handed out for the occasion.
“Going places,” they read.
• This article was amended on 19 February 2024. An earlier version said that more than 110,000 students were expected to attend Monash University’s “Jump Start’ program. In fact, this is the number expected to attend all Monash events during O-Week and 2,000 students are due to attend “Jump Start”.
Crisis centres don’t need a calendar to know when O-Week is on – they get a spike in calls from university students
Sharna Bremner