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FASS Blog – Arts and Social Sciences at the OUF by Dr. Susan Whitney (FASS Associate Dean, Associate Professor of History)

There’s nothing quite like being on the floor for all three days of the Ontario Universities Fair, aka OUF. Held in Toronto each September, OUF draws tens of thousands of high school students and their parents (a record-breaking 132,607 people this year) to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for the chance to talk to representatives from Ontario universities. All twenty-one Ontario universities participate and they construct elaborate booths designed to show off their university to its best advantage. Carleton is there in full force — with teams of faculty representatives from each of our five Faculties, student ambassadors, the entire staff of Carleton’s Recruitment Office, the top Admissions people, and the directors of our awards and co-op offices. Deans and Associate Deans are on the floor too, as are, for part of the weekend, the Provost and the Vice-President (Students and Enrolment).  It’s a huge team (98 people in all), and it truly functions as a team. Everyone in the striking Carleton booth works together to ensure that the students and parents who come into any part of Carleton’s three-sided booth get matched up with a faculty member who can talk to them about their specific academic interests.

And talk to them we do, repeating a variation of the same “salespitch” about our particular department or program over and over again, for hours on end, in as animated a fashion as possible. In an era when so many of the things we do in our daily lives seem to involve a computer of one size or another, this is a decidedly low-tech affair. It’s also an exhausting affair. As the weekend wears on, the willpower required to speak continuously and enthusiastically about the same thing increases. At times, I’m reminded of my student-athlete days at Princeton, when I often had to read academic texts or write some kind of paper when I was, quite simply, exhausted.

As physically tiring as the weekend can be, the three days have their interesting, moving, and even exhilarating moments. The waves of people seem to have their own inexplicable ebbs and flows, with Saturday between 10am and 2pm drawing the most intense crowds. At this point, the Carleton booth is literally crammed with people, and most of us are visibly perspiring and jostling for space on the thankfully plush Carleton carpet. But there are slower moments too, and these allow for different kinds of conversations. During one slow period (lunchtime on Friday), I talked at length to a thoughtful 28 year old actor who had been born and raised in Manitoba but was now living in Montreal. He had studied for two years at Concordia, but stopped, never having really found his groove at university. Now he was thinking of going back. He was thrilled to have discovered OUF because he had previously been driving from one Ontario university to the next in his quest to find a university that suited him and his goals this time around.  He was seriously considering coming to Ottawa, in part because he had come to realize that he needed to learn to speak French well to do what he wanted to do professionally in life and he thought that Ottawa would give him lots of opportunities to do this.

Ontario University Fair
Ontario Universities Fair

We talked about how he could go about studying French and other subjects at Carleton, and from there we got on to broader topics, including what it means to study the arts and social sciences at university in the year 2015. Would doing so, he wondered, make him a better actor? a better person? a more engaged citizen? I argued that it would do all of those things, and I talked to him about the opportunities that coming to Carleton would offer him, especially as a mature student who now understood the importance of faithfully attending class and taking advantage of every opportunity –academic or otherwise– offered to our students. After 45 minutes, he thanked me for my time and I wished him luck with whatever he ended up doing.

Of course, most of the prospective students we speak to at OUF are considerably younger than my Friday afternoon actor, and this means that we often spend a certain amount of time talking to both students and their parents, who can seem more excited about the possibility of attending university than their children. It can be a delicate dance. At one point, I found myself in a small group with one of our student recruiters, an almost impossibly enthusiastic Combined Honours Major in History and English, a male 12th grade student, and both of his parents. Since the student recruiter needed no help from me in talking to the student, I struck up a conversation with the young man’s father, who told me how impressed he was by all the professors that Carleton sends. “A lot of the other universities don’t do that,” he noted. At one point he mentioned how his son had learned leadership skills from twelve years in Scouting — and he was clearly intrigued to hear that students in my third-year “Youth and History” course read long extracts from the original 1908 Scouting handbook, Scouting for Boys. This led us to a discussion of the historical moment that had given birth to the Scouting movement, when the British Empire stretched across the globe, but when its leaders also felt threatened by a lackluster performance in the South African War and an increasingly powerful and newly unified German neighbour across the Channel.

Most of the conversations my colleagues and I had over the course of the weekend followed a more straightforward path, and we all got better at distilling what makes our departments special. We explained, over and over again, how our undergraduate programs are structured and described the very real advantages Carleton offers students who come to study the arts and social sciences with us in Ottawa: how our departments are big enough to offer a broad range of courses but small enough to focus on undergraduate teaching, how all arts and social science students can take a seminar of no more than 30 students in their first year, how undergraduate students really do benefit from being in the nation’s capital — whether it’s the History student who uses Library and Archives Canada for a fourth-year seminar paper or the Art History student who visits the National Gallery of Canada with a professor or does a practicum placement either there or at the Ottawa Art Gallery or the English student who gets in free at the Ottawa International Writers Festival or the French student who goes with a class to see French-language theatre at the National Arts Centre or the African Studies student who benefits from Ottawa’s large African population and political presence or the Music student who has the chance to perform at the National Arts Centre, as is the case this coming Tuesday night. The list goes on, and extends to the possibilities that Ottawa’s government departments and agencies and NGOs provide in terms of placement opportunities for our co-op and practicum students.

As I return to Ottawa on Sunday night, exhausted, I find myself strangely happy to have returned to OUF for the first time since 2010 and beyond grateful for the effort put in by our amazing FASS team of professors. I’m also thankful for the opportunity to have gotten to know them and their research and teaching passions better. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is a Faculty that was interdisciplinary long before “interdisciplinarity” became something that all universities made a point of emphasizing, and the research programs I heard about over dinner or in slow moments on the convention centre floor are rich and vibrant, crisscrossing disciplinary and national borders alike. From the politics of local food and sustainable communities to the contributions of a Tudor queen to sixteenth-century religious and political propaganda, from women workers in Africa to the psychology of emerging adulthood in Canada, the topics I heard about are broad and my colleagues’ scholarly engagement obvious. What was even more on view throughout the weekend, however, was their unabiding passion for teaching and their total commitment to our students. One member of our FASS team bowed out of Saturday dinner to grade papers that she was determined to return during her Monday 8:30am English literature class!

Looking back over the three days, it occurs to me, daughter of an ad man that I am, that although we were no doubt “selling” our departments and our arts and social science degree programs (the Bachelor of Arts, the Bachelor of Music, the Bachelor of Humanities, the Bachelor of Cognitive Science, and the Bachelor of Global and International Studies), it was an easy mission because we all believe so strongly in what we do in the classroom and what we have to offer students who come to study with us in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton.

The FASS OUF All-Star Team! Professors (left to right) Patrizia Gentile, John Logan, Anne Bowker, Sukeshi Kamra, Susan Whitney, Blair Rutherford, Aboubakar Sanogo, Dana Dragunoiu (bottom). Also representing FASS from 25-27 September, but not present for this early Friday morning photo, were Professors Patricia Ballamingie, Richard Mann, James Wright, Micheline White, and Catherine Khordoc, Interim Dean of FASS.
The FASS OUF All-Star Team! Professors (left to right) Patrizia Gentile, John Logan, Anne Bowker, Sukeshi Kamra, Susan Whitney, Blair Rutherford, Aboubakar Sanogo, Dana Dragunoiu (bottom). Also representing FASS from 25-27 September, but not present for this early Friday morning photo, were Professors Patricia Ballamingie, Richard Mann, James Wright, Micheline White, and Catherine Khordoc, Interim Dean of FASS.