TGIF Welcome Weekend
Gogo Lemea
During the first weekend of the fall semester, Cornell’s Welcome Weekend hosted “TGIF: Welcome Weekend”. While this event is aimed at freshmen and transfer students, it is open to all members of the Cornell Community. Welcome Weekend hosted a wide variety of events that would interest many Cornell students.
The event started off with performances from Cornell’s various dance groups, including Cornell Bhangra, the Belly Dancing troupe, and the West Coast Swing Dance group. Some of these groups later gave free dance lessons to anyone willing to give it a try. Later in the night, Cornell Cinema provided free showings of two critically-acclaimed blockbuster movies: Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and the MCU’s Captain Marvel. Welcome Weekend also hosted many other events, from exhilarating games of laser tag to a more relaxing evening of painting with Cornell’s Guild of Visual Arts. To top it all off, a free breakfast for dinner event was held in Okenshields, in addition to free ice cream and Willard Straight Hall’s usual free popcorn.
I volunteered at the event for about six hours, so I had numerous tasks throughout the night. The event had a very large turnout, so I spent a large amount of my time doing crowd control (mostly for the free food lines). In addition, I helped serve ice cream take photos of Welcome Weekend at various points. However, I was also able to participate in some of the events, and Welcome Weekend provided free pizza for all of the volunteers. At the end of the night, I spent a lot of time with the other volunteers to clean up so that all of the wonderful people who put on their events could go home at a reasonable time.
Overall, the event was very fun, and even though I got home at 1 a.m. I am still glad I chose to volunteer. I would highly recommend volunteering at Welcome Weekend’s other big event, Clubfest, or volunteering at the beginning of the spring semester.