On the fifth floor of Victoria Hall, Abhay Katoch, Sci ’25, had not yet put sheets on his bed.
His parents had driven him roughly three hours to Kingston, helped unload two boxes and a suitcase, then left to move his sister into another residence. Katoch carried his belongings upstairs alone, dropped onto the bare mattress and fell asleep.
When he woke, he unpacked for about an hour. Then he sat beside the books he had brought from home, wondering what to do.
He put on his shoes and started walking through the building. On his floor, he passed an L-shaped room with its door open and looked inside without meaning to. He started to apologize. The students invited him in.
Katoch sat down with Will and Remy. Five years later, he said, they are still good friends.
Four storeys below, on the first floor of the same building that week, AJ*, ArtSci ’25, also went looking.
AJ had never spent more than two weeks away from home. University had seemed enormous in his imagination. The room he entered felt ordinary.
“It felt kind of anticlimactic, because in my head it was cut out to be this whole big thing,” AJ said in an interview with The Journal. “And then you get there and it’s like, okay, now what?”
He propped open his door. He knocked on every door on the floor. He tried, he said, “to be as social as possible.”
Five years later, he is not in touch with anyone from that floor.
Same building, same September, same advice: leave the room, approach someone, say hello. One accidental glance through an open door became a five-year friendship. One deliberate round of door-knocking produced no connection that lasted beyond the year.
Of the 23 Queen’s students who responded to a July survey by The Journal, 11 described their first night in residence as overwhelming. Three chose pure euphoria. 13 said nothing had gone wrong — and six of those 13 still described themselves as overwhelmed or numb.
The Journal also interviewed students who later became dons, Gaels, or orientation organizers. Several remembered their own arrival as empty, overwhelming or unlike what they had imagined.
Four students, across four years and three residences, can be traced in a single line. None knew the whole chain existed.
Waiting for someone else to go first
Sydney Welsh, ArtSci ’27, watched the gap between private fear and public confidence from a few feet away.
As a Gael — an upper-year student who volunteers to guide first-years through orientation week — she was assigned seven chemistry students who had just met.
“They were very excited for it. But I could also tell they were all super nervous about not knowing each other,” Welsh said
She watched them move toward conversation, then pull back.
“I saw them wanting to interact, then also being a little scared to do so,” she said.
Each appeared to be waiting for somebody else to speak first.
“I think we all know we all go through it,” Welsh said, “but no one actually realizes we all go through it.”
Katoch’s 2021 cohort faced an additional problem. Pandemic restrictions had disrupted the final years of high school, leaving students without a clear idea of how university students were supposed to behave.
Their reference point was not an older class. It was movies.
“The college dorm scene kind of felt a lot like 22 Jump Street,” Katoch said.
“People were kind of living the stereotype of what you would expect the first week in college to be like, because no one actually remembered what it was supposed to be like.”
New students were not the only people performing confidence.
Before Welsh became a Gael, she arrived knowing nobody and feeling “super-duper scared.” As a leader, she wanted her group to experience a different week.
“I wanted to go and put on a good face, so then they would be inspired to enjoy their time and love it as much as I loved my frosh week,” she said.
Eleven months planning for one week of orientation
The process to put together orientation for 5,000 students is more than what is visible to the average student.
Natasha Andrade, ArtSci ’27, president of the Arts and Science Undergraduate Society, said coordinators are hired in December and begin meeting in January. Registration opens in July, and organizers return to campus early — some waking for buses leaving at 3 a.m., others setting up the sidewalk sale at 5 a.m.
By September, nearly a year of work has been turned into something designed to look spontaneous.
Andrade’s own first night was not. She arrived with one high-school friend who lived in another residence.
“[The first night] wasn’t super exciting or anything,” Andrade said.
Within days, her friend had made more friends than she had. Orientation became one of the structures through which Andrade found people of her own. She later returned as a leader and eventually helped oversee the week.
The students behind the doors
Bella Rose, Sci ’23, spent the 2020–21 academic year as a don in Victoria Hall — an upper-year student compensated with room and board to live and support its students in residence.
Rose made rounds at roughly 8 p.m., 11 p.m., and 1 a.m., listening for arguments, loud music and signs that someone needed help. The job meant deciding when to knock, when to step in, and when to keep walking.
Ali Bekheet, Sci ’25, a Victoria Hall don in 2021, described the role as closer to a neighbour than an officer.
“I wasn’t much of a rule enforcer,” Bekheet said. “I was just there as a guide.”
He also pointed out that dons were navigating their own transitions.
“Dons are on that journey too,” he said. “While you’re getting to know first year, your don might be getting to know second year.”
Rose remembered asking other dons whether anyone else was struggling to get students to attend floor meetings.
“Everyone’d be like, yeah, me, me, me,” she said. “It’s not just me. My students don’t just hate me.”
The people hired to make first-years feel less alone were often asking whether anyone wanted them there.
“There were a lot more times when I was a don in Vic where I could have used a shoulder and was the one providing the shoulder anyway,” Rose said.
Who gets noticed
What a don can see is narrower than what the job requires.
Rose said students often needed extra support after the first week, once friendships had begun to settle.
“Everybody is very social and friendly and outgoing in that first week, because everybody’s kind of in the same boat,” she said. “But then, as time progresses, people are reaching out less because they’ve settled into friendships, and then that’s kind of where the dust settles.”
The survey suggests support often reached students whose distress was visible. The two respondents who remembered receiving help from a don on their first night had both cried.
Another respondent wrote that she and her roommate were crying but received no help, though she could have used it.
Rounds covered only a don’s own floor and only while they were on shift. In reality, many issues unfolded elsewhere.
Near midnight outside Location 21, Isaac Sahota, ArtSci ’22, noticed a student sitting alone. Sahota was a Watts Hall don from 2020-2022. That night, he was off duty, in another building, and the student was not his.
“This is late at night, and this is not how people just sit somewhere alone,” Sahota remembered thinking.
“And things were not okay.”
He declined to explain what happened next. What mattered, he said, was recognizing the situation and acting before anybody asked him to.
Welsh found during her time as a Gael another signal: absence.
When students stopped attending events, she and her co-Gael compared their roster with the people in front of them. They texted whoever was missing and asked whether they were okay.
“[It] is easier to do with a group of seven people,” Welsh said.
But some of what happened next still depended on students making the first move.
Katoch said during his time as a don he noticed first-years left their doors open, wandered the halls, and sat beside strangers in dining halls. He also acknowledged the part nobody controls: “a little bit of luck.”
Bekheet’s advice to other studnets assumed the system might fail someone and told them to keep moving anyway.
“If your Gael doesn’t reach out, show up to orientation anyway,” he said. “Someone will put you in the right place.”
He was also blunt about what the system could promise.
“It’s important to realize that it’s not a foolproof system,” Bekheet said. “There’s so many nets that you can rely on, set in place. But not all of them are proactive.”
A friend first
AJ is the kind of student Bekheet’s warning describes.
He followed the usual advice. He propped open his door and knocked on every door on his floor, but nothing came back. Nobody detected a crisis because there was no visible crisis to detect.
“Maybe I was standoffish accidentally as well,” AJ said.
He was reached anyway — not because the system identified him, but because the don on his floor had made himself someone AJ could text.
Bekheet was the first person AJ met at Queen’s. Over the year, they ate together, watched reality television and talked about nothing in particular.
“We had stupid talks about reality TV or whatever,” AJ said.
What AJ noticed was that Bekheet never held the role over him.
“A lot of dons would treat their kids like they were above them,” AJ said. “But our don Ali — he was your friend first and foremost. He was actually your friend.”
The proof was repeatable.
“He didn’t just say that on the first day and give his number and be like, ‘Hey, text me whenever,’ and then not keep his word,” AJ said. “But he genuinely would. Every single time within, like, half an hour.”
Four floors up, Katoch had found his people in an afternoon and also did not want the form of support residence staff typically offered.
“The type of support that the university and the residence dons would sanction and provide is a little bit infantilizing in the way that it’s like gentle parenting,” he said.
Katoch also questioned whether an institution could provide community at all.
“I got a sense of community in first year,” he said. “But I think that was something that I made for myself. It wasn’t really something that was provided to me.”
How care travelled
Bekheet did not invent the approach that worked for AJ. Instead, he learned it from a don in his first-year.
Bekheet arrived at Queen’s in 2020 from abroad and arrived late, outside the normal move-in cycle. He lived in Leggett Hall, where his assigned don spoke with him only a handful of times.
The person who reached him lived in another building.
Isaac Sahota was a don in Watts Hall. Engineering students from Leggett kept showing up on his floor, so he kept appearing in hallways that were not his responsibility.
“He was so supportive, always talked to us, made sure we were all okay,” Bekheet said. “Isaac inspired me to be a don. I wanted to be that Isaac figure for other students.”
Sahota had arrived at Queen’s not knowing anyone, while his family lived in another country.
“I was excited. I’m going to meet new people. But there was so much emptiness,” he said.
Walking the building was less about supervision than avoiding the loneliness of staying in his room.
“I never saw don and students as Team A, Team B,” Sahota said. “I always tried to be there as a community member rather than an authority figure.”
Besides the emptiness, Sahota remembers his first-year don — whom he remembers only as Daniel, who was, he said, “really, really nice.” Daniel inspired him to apply to be a don.
The line runs across four years and three residences.
Daniel reached Sahota in 2019. Sahota reached Bekheet in 2020. Bekheet became a Victoria Hall don in 2021 and the first person AJ met at Queen’s.
Sahota knew none of this.
During his interview with The Journal, Sahota learned Bekheet had become a don and that a student on Bekheet’s floor later described him as a friend first and a don second.
Sahota paused.
“It melts my heart, makes my day better, gives me another beautiful memory,” he said.
Then Sahota explained why the story had struck him so deeply. It reminded him of someone.
“That kid who was alone in his room was also me,” he said.
“So I’m glad we are able to help someone who was also in my position,” he added. “So it’s just helping your own self, right?”
What remained
The acts of care travelled from one student to the next, even though the people in the chain did not stay connected — or even know it existed.
Bekheet did not independently remember the student who called him a friend first. AJ is not in touch with Bekheet. Daniel has never been told where any of it went.
Sahota spent two years making himself available to other students while nobody knocked on his door.
“I wish they knocked on my door,” he said.
And yet, some relationships lasted.
Bekheet has returned to Kingston once since graduating — to give a former student from his floor his iron ring.
“He’s not my student anymore, but he’s my friend now,” Bekheet said.
Asked what he hoped students from that year remembered about him, he put himself last.
“I hope they’d remember me, but that’s not the important part,” he said. “I really hope that they built their lifelong connections in an environment that was supported by the work that we were doing.”
AJ, who knocked on every door on his floor and is still not in touch with anyone behind them, was asked what he would tell a first-year having the night he had.
“I’m not gonna say, oh, everyone’s in the same boat, because that’s just not true,” he said.
What he offered instead was distance.
“By the end of fourth year, I don’t think about first year at all,” AJ said. “What I do think about is fourth year all the time, and all my friends, and all the great things we did together.”
“I don’t ever think about the misery and plight. That loneliness,” he continued. “I don’t think about that, because by fourth year, you’re a whole different person and things do get better.”
Tags
dons, Dorm, first year, Residence
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