Welcome Week Update

Over the past few weeks, the GSA staff team has been tirelessly at work, planning our Welcome Week for incoming Postgraduate students. There’s been some key developments in the past few weeks, particularly the recent government guidelines which limit socialising in groups of more than six, which have forced us to reevaluate our plans.

We’ve been speaking with key members of the University to help us determine what’s the best plan of action for our events next week. We’ve also been discussing this with the wider GSA team of staff and sabbatical officers who will be running all of our activities.

We are committed to providing a brilliant Welcome Week, but most importantly we are adamant that our provision must be safe.

With this in mind, the GSA has made some changes to our original Welcome Week plans. We have retained the core of our provision, with over fourteen events still going ahead. We have the Big Zoom Mingle events specifically designed to help you meet other Postgraduates, a morning yoga session online, and a chance to meet up with our sabbatical officers online.  We’ve now added an extra session for the Online Escape Rooms, and a pub quiz. You can also find other Postgraduates who share the same interests as yourself through our newly launched Fantasy Football league and our Role Playing Games Facebook group (for those of you who love DnD).

There have been changes, however, with our plans for the evening events where numbers were expected to be largest (The Fancy Dress Night, the FoodFest Night and the Friday Night Festival). These events are to be replaced by online alternatives, which we’re currently organising and will be revealing soon.

If you’d already bought a ticket to any of these events we’ll be in touch with you in the next few days and we’ll be providing you with a full refund. We also won’t be hosting our campus tours in person, but you can catch the two live streamed tours on our social media – one for campus west and one for campus east.

We have also planned some outdoor events in small numbers in central York with external providers. These include the walking tours of York and An Afternoon at Jorvik, which will be going ahead as planned. The providers we’re working with already have social distancing measures in place which meet the government’s guidelines and were originally planned for small group numbers. For those of you who have booked into these events we’ll be in touch in the coming days to let you know how they are being managed.

This doesn’t mean that there is no on campus provision for new students. ‘The Forest’ venue is a perfect on campus meeting place for incoming students ensuring that you’ll have a place to informally socialise with friends. For the evenings during Welcome Week it will be nearly entirely for postgraduate students and we fully recommend it as a place to hang out with your friends.

We hope that you understand why we’ve made these decisions and that you have a wonderful Welcome Week. Please find our full events schedule here: www.yorkgsa.org/welcome