By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life. What did you hope for in terms of employment as you completed your PhD?
I wanted to be an academic — but not only an academic. As early as my undergraduate days, I had my eyes on career paths that would involve participating in public debate and policy-making. I thought that academia might provide a good platform from which to do those things — and my graduate education was essential to developing my most valuable skills — but I learned about and prepared for other options along the way. More...
12 avril 2014
Transition Q & A: Daniel Munro
Tinkering with your career
By Liz Koblyk. I’ve been taken with the Tinkering Studio, where people put together common items in unusual ways. The idea with tinkering is to use what’s at hand, in ways not originally intended, and to focus more on what you can produce rather than on whether you’re qualified to produce it. While light-up jewellery made out of binder rings might not be your scene, tinkering still offers a good way of thinking about career flexibility and exploration. More...
A postsecondary enrolment bust is coming
By David K. Foot. For the past 15 years, Canada’s postsecondary institutions have benefited from educating the children of the Boomers. The Echo, or Gen-Y, generation includes those born between 1980 and 1996. They are now aged 18 to 34. Those born in the peak year, 1991, are 23 years old, possibly finishing undergraduate studies or doing a graduate degree. More...
How Western got its weather data
By Alan MacEachern. Warning: I’m going to talk about my own work in this column. I don’t usually like to do that, because it smacks of self-promotion. I prefer my self-promotion masked as self-deprecation. That’s the Maritime way.
In 2008, I had a meeting at the Environment Canada headquarters in Downsview, Ontario. Other visitors probably get to see where they make the weather, but because I’m a historian, they showed me the old stuff. We went to the basement and walked down aisle after aisle of weather observations: all of the original paper forms that volunteers and paid observers had filled out, multiple times a day, across thousands of stations across Canada, from 1840 onward. More...
Co-op programs are popular and growing at Canadian universities
By Rosanna Tamburri. Amid growing controversy over unpaid student internships and stagnant economic conditions, co-op programs continue to thrive and grow at Canadian universities and colleges. But some people question whether the rapid expansion can continue without compromising the quality of students’ experiences.
“Co-op is definitely growing, and our membership is increasing,” said Christine Arsenault, past president of the Canadian Association for Co-operative Education (CAFCE) and director of management co-op programs at the University of Toronto Scarborough. According to CAFCE, 55 universities, 26 colleges and three institutes offer some 1,100 co-op programs. More...
Canadian professors establish a new institute of higher learning to train the next generation of Haitian scientists
By Jean François Bouthillette. By mid-May, the first cohort of students at the Institut des sciences, des technologies et des études avancées d’Haïti (ISTEAH) will finish their first year of studies. Since the fall, 61 students on three Haitian campuses – in Cap-Haïtien, Port-au-Prince and Hinche – have benefitted from the teaching and support of foreign professors working at the new school. More...
University leaders reach out through social media
By Cassandra Hendry. University and college presidents are increasingly using social media to engage with their constituencies, says Dan Zaiontz, who works in strategic planning and public affairs at Seneca College in Toronto.
As a capstone project for his recent master’s degree in communication studies at McMaster University, Mr. Zaiontz conducted confidential interviews with 22 presidents (11 each from Canada and the United States) about their social media use. Twitter was the most popular platform, with all 22 presidents using it, followed by Facebook with 16 users. LinkedIn was a distant third while tools such as Instagram, Google+, Reddit and Flickr barely registered. More...
Exploring the humanities through unique makerspaces
By Cassandra Hendry. Circuit boards, screwdrivers and 3D printers aren’t typically found in a university’s humanities faculty, but the University of Victoria’s Maker Lab in the Humanities is no ordinary place. Opened in 2012, the Maker Lab follows the recent trend of “makerspaces” – collaborative, community-based workshops stocked with tools and materials for people to experiment with and create new things. But, what sets the UVic lab apart is blending this “makerspace ethos” with the humanities. More...
Cyberbullying a problem at Canadian universities, study shows
By Natalie Samson. Three researchers at Simon Fraser University report that cyberbullying is a growing concern at Canadian universities and that universities will need to address it forcefully, with clearer policies than the ones now in place. Wanda Cassidy, associate professor of education and director of SFU’s Centre for Education, Law and Society (or CELS), Margaret Jackson, professor emerita of criminology, and Chantal Faucher, postdoctoral fellow at CELS, are among only a handful of people in the world examining cyberbullying at universities. Since 2012, the three have been working on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to investigate cyberbullying at four Canadian universities. More...
How to build a classroom community that includes ESL students
By Katherine Anderson. Is our higher education system being threatened by too many English-as-a-Second-Language students? In a recent article, professors Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney ventured that too many students are “academically or linguistically unprepared” for academic discourse. The article, “Internationalizing the Canadian campus: ESL students and the erosion of higher education,” touched a collective nerve, with at least 20 comments so far. Some commenters called the professors’ arguments “ignorant” or “racist.”
It’s time to replace this invective with constructive solutions. More...
