The year at Whitworth university starts with some orientation days where you receive a lot of useful information during the day about rules, tips and history of the university.

Later in the afternoon and at night, we do some different activities and we have a lot more fun.

The basic concept is that you get to know your dorm family and create bonds, mostly by “competing” against the other dorms.

The first night, we just try to get to know each other, especially learning all the names. WE also meet all the leadership team and they tell us all the story and tradition of our dorm. Which will remain secret…

Then we also learn about the agenda of the week: trainings! It’s not mandatory but there’re 2 contests organized during traditiation and we wanted to win them, since BMac usually end up second for all those dorm-competitions. Hence, we decided to spend all our free time practicing.

The first one is a dorm’s traditional song singing contest. So, we learned all these songs which are actually quite fun and easy to remember but you also need to add some coordinates moves!

Those song are also used for the other nights of traditiation. The rules are easy, if you cross one group, you scream your dorm song as loud as possible while you’re next to each other.

One of them is basically, each dorm split in two groups. Then one of the group stay on their front porch and wait for the other half of all the other dorms who run around the campus and visit all the buildings. Every time, one group arrives to one dorm, they start singing one of their song, followed by the host, then by the guest, et cetera. All this in a really nice atmosphere, it’s a lot of fun for everyone.

Then, it was finally the night of this first contest, the yell-off. After all the singing and dancing practice, we finally got to perform I front of all the other dorm and shout/sing the loudest possible.  At that point, we realized it wasn’t an actual contest since there was no judge, but we were still proud of us at the end because we rocked it and also, we had a really good time.

Talking, about rocking something, the second contest is called “mock-rock”. It’s a lip-sync competition which most look like a dance one with our lips moving. We really did practice a lot for this for 2 or 3 days to first, choose the song then find the moves, learn them and then coordinate. this was a really nice way to learn the names of everyone and also get to know a bit the personality of everyone.

So, on the last night of the Orientation program, we performed and enjoy the show created by all the other dorm. And last, but not least, we actually won this rock and with that we broke the second-place malediction of BMac. Since BMac, is 2 dorms combined we each receive the rock every other week to expose in our lounge.

Little conclusion, to everyone going to Whitworth, I’d advice to participate in this for sure, it really creates bounds with all the freshman of the dorm and it’s a lot of fun.