It’s a brand new year, and the Ontarion is turning a new page. We are your Independent Student Newspaper, and our goal each and every year is to reflect the interests of the University of Guelph students. To quote one of the Ontarion editors in the 1990s, “If you don’t like what we’re doing with the paper, you can volunteer to help change it…It’s your paper.”
The paper does in fact change every single year as it strives to communicate the changes of society and campus, as well as the individuality of its staff. After 50+ years of operation, the Ontarion is still one of very few independent student newspaper in Canada, and we take pride in this.
We are always on the lookout for individuals to contribute to our paper; we seek volunteer writers, illustrators, photographers, etc. Not only will your contributions make the paper more diverse in its content, but it will teach you multiple skills that will be transferable to the “real” world.
During this summer semester, we encourage you to try and make it out to at least one of our volunteer meetings. These meetings fall on May 16, May 30 and June 13, and as always they take place on our comfy couches at 5:30 p.m. in UC 264. Feel free to drop in and pitch your own ideas for the paper, we want you to look forward to reading every single issue of the Ontarion.
Even if you don’t volunteer for us, the Ontarion prides itself on being a positive space and we strive to be a welcoming environment to those who visit. Come by and flip through some of our bound archived-issues dating back to the ’50s and read about the challenges students were facing at that point in time. Often times their experiences were not dissimilar to our own, and to quote Mark Twain, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”