Despite the gloomy weather this Halloween weekend, UFV students still found a way to make the best of the holiday with events hosted by En Route and UFV International.
On Sunday night, En Route, a new student club that connects international and domestic students through travel tours, held a hybrid Halloween-Diwali event at U-House. All attendees were greeted by an enthusiastic welcoming committee at the front door, then guided into a room with Indian samosas and sweets. At the back of the room there was a table covered in plastic and topped with watermelons, cantaloupes, honeydew melons, pineapples, and a pumpkin. After an intense game of musical chairs to determine who got to carve which fruit, the participants were paired off and given butter knives to up the challenge.
Preet Sahota, the club’s president, chose to expand the fruit choices as an effort to be more inclusive of people’s preferences. If someone doesn’t like pumpkins she wanted them to still participate in the event, and this way they can choose what they like. Once the fruit carvings were completed and judged the participants carpooled to Fright Nights in Vancouver.
There’s always something exciting going on in the UFV International lounge and Monday afternoon was no exception. The clamour of Halloween-themed music and student laughter filled the lounge. Students and staff were dressed up and enjoying cookie decorating, face painting, pizza, and even dance-themed video games.
Every term UFV International hires five students to work on engaging international students and facilitating comradery between international and domestic students. This year’s Halloween events were put on mostly by Sherlock Chen, a third-year visual arts student originally from China.
“He designed five different [posters] and came up with the whole idea to have a Halloween selfie competition,” explained Chelsey Laird, the international education department’s coordinator of global engagement programming.
The competition officially ended at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, and a total of 27 students participated by taking a selfie with the intricately designed posters around UFV’s campus and posting the picture to UFV International’s Facebook page.
The winners were chosen by the amount of likes each photo received, and Thanh Ma and Ashmeet Kaur took home the grand prize with 198 likes. Runners up were Uchral Letestu and Maryam Momtahen with 189 likes.
This was Chen’s first job in Canada and he has been at it for roughly two years now. Sherlock thought the selfie challenge idea would get lots of people around campus engaged and also encourage international students to walk around the university and get acquainted with it.
“Everyone loves taking selfies,” Chen said.
Although it is always nice to have an event that is packed full of people, Chen was more concerned that students at the event enjoyed themselves.
“We don’t have very mature campus culture,” he said. “We are doing what we can with what we have, and hopefully we can change students’ minds about the experience and what they can get from UFV. We are proud of what we have but we should keep moving forward.”
