On Monday, July 18, UBC’s Vancouver Summer Program (VSP) hosted a welcome event to kick off the first program in three years.
The VSP is a two-term, four-week academic exchange program designed for international undergraduate students. The program started in 2013 and allows students to take courses accredited at their home universities.
This term’s cohort is composed of 164 students from 26 different countries, selected from 648 applicants. In 2019, there were 3,000 participants over both summer terms.
The program opened with a land acknowledgement and speech from Musqueam Elder Larry Grant, in where he spoke about the significance of Indigenous history and contemporary issues, like settler colonialism and the climate crisis, for international students in Canada.
Cheryl Dumaresq, the managing director of UBC’s Vice-Provost international, also spoke, welcoming the students to campus and introducing the deans and associate deans in attendance. VSP Director Caroline Lai thanked the organizational team and partners for their work on the event.
The event also featured musical performances from UBC A Cappella and the Julio Avila Cuban Band.
The VSP has faced significant setbacks in organization since its last program in July 2019. The program could not be hosted from 2020 to 2021 due to global COVID-19 restrictions. The university also planned to host a virtual term this year, but it was cancelled due to low enrolment.
Still, staff expressed pride and satisfaction with the successful organization of the program. Andy Phung, a fourth-year finance student and assistant organizer for the VSP, described the reestablishment of the VSP as hugely significant for UBC and international exchange.
“This is the first summer program since the pandemic started. There’s been a lot of change across the planet, and in our university,” Phung said. “After all these challenges, it’s finally time for us to show that we’ve adapted to this new environment that we are in. Our team is dynamic and fairly small, but we have high trust in each other and work to allow our students to have the best experience possible.”
Phung described organizing this year’s program as a “fun challenge” and expressed hope that attendees would be able to use the program’s student-centred community events as a means of connecting with others, and creating an “[understanding of] what UBC and Vancouver stand for.”
Attendees expressed satisfaction with the orientation and Welcome Event — the interactive salsa performance was particularly popular — and described their experiences thus far as overwhelmingly positive.
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