Dalhousie University has announced it is banning alcohol in on-campus residences during the upcoming orientation week.

Officials say the goal is to keep students safe and encourage a shift away from heavy partying and binge drinking during the first week of school.

Other universities have tried similar programs to discourage students from binge drinking. St. Thomas University was one of the first schools in Canada to implement a full alcohol ban during Orientation Week when it brought in a dry week 13 years ago. That even included students who were of legal age.

“These students are arriving from all over the world and all coming from different backgrounds and experiences, and they want to arrive on campus and get their bearings,” says St. Thomas University associate vice-president Scott Duguay. “Introducing alcohol in that first were just doesn't seem like a way to experience that in a good way.”

Second-year St. Thomas student Jessica Comeau felt that having a dry week during her first year put everybody on level ground.

“You get make friends for real,” Comeau says. “It also allows students to build connections sober, which is something that is valued because you're not going to remember everyone you meet drunk.”

Implementing a dry week has been a direct challenge to the notion that you need alcohol to have a good time or make an introduction.

“What scares us is that first-year students coming in might think that's how you should be, so we want to give students that first week to realize that there are plenty of students like them and don't necessarily engage in alcohol on a daily basis,” says Duguay.

One initial critique of having a dry week at St. Thomas was that people would just leave campus or go down the hill to the University of New Brunswick, where there isn’t a residence-wide alcohol ban during the first week.

“It sometimes catches people off guard that you have to kind of surrender the alcohol and let the residence be an alcohol-free place for the first week, but it becomes normal pretty quickly,” says STU Welcome Week co-ordinator Hannah Zamora.

Now after 13 years of being in effect, there has been no feedback at STU for it to change.

“Once you can kind of push through, it becomes a normal thing and the leaders who get to inherit that responsibility get to keep fostering the dry week, the sense of community that comes with it,” says Zamora.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Nick Moore.