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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. �Ӱ�ԭ�� is there in full force — with teams of faculty representatives from each of our five Faculties, student ambassadors, the entire staff of �Ӱ�ԭ��’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 �Ӱ�ԭ�� booth works together to ensure that the students and parents who come into any part of �Ӱ�ԭ��’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….

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 �Ӱ�ԭ�� 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 �Ӱ�ԭ�� 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…

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 �Ӱ�ԭ��.

For the full article see /fass/2015/selling-arts-social-sciences-ontario-universities-fair/