McGill Winter Carnival
Carnival is this an annual philanthropic event that has been happening at McGill University for over 75 years now. It takes place the first week back from winter break so early January and over 1000 students participate. Typically, there’s about 12 to 16 teams and then each team will have 60 to 100 students. Over the course of the week, each of these teams will compete in a number of different activities, trying to amass the highest number of points to make their team victorious. There are activities happening from 8 AM in the morning, every hour of the day and occasionally entirely through the night with all nighters and slumber parties. Every year carnival raises tens of thousands of dollars for the Canadian cancer foundation. I was on carnival committee, which is the group that does all of the planning and hosting for this weeklong event. Most people don’t realize that Mcgill was actually in Playboy‘s top 10 party universities in the world. It is very unique because you’re dealing with a student population that are all legal drinking age when they got to the university with the 18 drinking age in Montreal. In the United States, a large portion of college parties happen in the shadows and at fraternity houses because they are illicit. Because everything was legal in Montreal, we could do these far more elaborate licensed events that were officially recognized by the university. It made things a lot safer because we could always have the Campus resources for health and safety at every event to take care of people.