Two more days of orientation

At the halfway point, orientation for this year's first-year students seems to be a merry success, I was told late on Wednesday afternoon in the arts quadrangle. That's where I spotted a golf cart piloted by Michelle Zakrison, president of the Federation of Students, with associate provost Catharine Scott riding shotgun. They've been using the FOCmobile to visit as many orientation events as possible at various extremities of the campus, and they report that the student leaders are terrific, the newcomers are enjoying themselves and the programs are achieving their aims in this week before the fall term begins.

From the Finn Green Games at St. Jerome's University this morning to a science bonfire on the north campus tonight, social events dominate today's orientation schedule. The big event of the day is for Village residents: inter-quad competitions, a midday barbecue, and then an afternoon concert on the Matthews Hall green. Evening events will include an engineering scavenger hunt and an arts outing to Federation Hall (“The Omega”). With a largely outdoor program, the T-shirted crowds can look forward to nothing worse than showers, weather forecasters are saying for the next 48 hours.

Some groups, meanwhile, are doing their own thing. First-year architecture students will spend much of today doing set-up in the studios where they’ll soon be spending most of their waking hours. St. Paul’s College students are off to the Elora Gorge today. And Conrad Grebel University College students are getting ready for the traditional weekend outing to Camp Trillium.

Tomorrow morning is a sleep-in time for most of the 5,000-plus new first-year students. They'll roll out of bed in time for "Black and Gold Day" — a pep rally, starting at 11 a.m. at the Columbia Icefield, and then a mass visit to the nearby playing fields to see the men’s rugby Warriors face Toronto’s Varsity Blues.

Tomorrow evening, they'll be ga-ga at the go-go when they see him in his toga. It's the now traditional Saturday night toga party on the Matthews Hall green — entirely alcohol-free for the second year in a row. Still, Saturday night's party could be on the loud side, and the city of Waterloo has given a waiver of its noise bylaw for music until the wee hours. For those who don't fancy Roman attire al fresco, there's an official alternative: a comedy performance in Federation Hall.

And on the seventh day, they rest. Classes start Monday morning.

Games earlier this week for newcomers in arts: "Make sure to introduce first-years casually and in a comfortable setting to reduce nervousness or awkwardness," the manual for orientation leaders urges. "No matter what our differences are, whether we come from different religions or cultures, we are all University students and should bond together as one community." Photo by Michael Strickland.

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CS benefactor is hailed today

from the UW media relations office

Computer scientist and entrepreneur David Cheriton (right) will be at UW today to hear some of the thanks that he couldn't listen to in person when UW's school of computer science was named in his honour last year.

He was unable to be in Waterloo last November for the announcement of his $25 million gift to UW and the resulting naming of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. But today, Cheriton will attend a celebration event and speak at an academic symposium.

UW has display ads in the Record and Globe and Mail today acknowledging a "transformational gift" from Cheriton. "We thank David," writes UW president David Johnston, "for his enormous faith in UW, in what we have achieved, and in our vision for the future."

Cheriton, a UW graduate, is a computer science professor at Stanford University and leading venture capitalist in high-tech companies. After earning his graduate degrees from UW, he spent three years at the University of British Columbia, then began his career at Stanford, where he heads the Distributed Systems Group. His gift to Waterloo led to the establishment of the David R. Cheriton Endowment for Excellence in Computer Science to fund research chairs, faculty fellowships and graduate scholarships.

He is widely known for research in high-performance scalable systems, Internet architecture and hardware-software interaction, as well as the successful commercialization of his research results. His current interests include distributed systems, next-generation Internet architecture, operating systems and object-oriented design techniques. He received a SigComm Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2003.

Besides his achievements in research, Cheriton has been involved in a number of startup companies as co-founder and as investor. As well, he has been a technical adviser to Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Google, VMware and Tibco. He was named one of Forbes magazine's Top Ten Venture Capitalists (2005) based on his seed investment in Google. Three years ago he received a Faculty of Mathematics Alumni Achievement Medal from UW.

The public celebration event today begins at 11:30 a.m. in the great hall of the Davis centre, followed by a light lunch. At 1:30 p.m., the 2006 Inaugural Cheriton Research Symposium will be held in Davis Centre room 1302. Five speakers from the computer science school -- Ashraf Aboulnaga, Peter Forsyth, Srinivasan Keshav, Pascal Poupart and Ian Munro -- along with Cheriton will give research presentations.

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Pixels in the big picture

When the alumni office distributed "Glad to be a Grad" stickers recently, inviting staff and faculty who are also UW alumni to wear them during orientation week, they promised there would be prizes. Chantel Franklin of alumni affairs says she was happy to spot Graham Whitelaw of environment and resource studies, whose MA and PhD are from Waterloo, and Dan McCarthy, a BES graduate now working on a planning degree, together on campus (left) and hand out tokens of thanks. Other winners have included Scott Spidell of the drama and speech communication department, Dorothy Chapman of the registrar's office, Paul Royston of the mathematics faculty, and Andrew Smith of environmental studies.

With the new students of 2006 just barely arrived on campus, UW's marketing and undergraduate recruitment office is seriously into plans for how to attract the newcomers of 2007 (enough of them, the best ones and the right ones) to Waterloo. It's less than a month till the annual Universities Fair in Toronto, one of the major recruitment opportunities of the year. "We'll be using a new system to manage undergraduate recruitment brochure requests," writes Tina Roberts, the office's director. The key tool is a link on the "prospective student" web site labelled, reasonably enough, "Request brochures". She says: "By the middle of September, brochures (viewbooks and faculty, university college, and program brochures) will be available at the Registrar's Office front counter, the Visitors Centre, and the Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment Office (NH 3007)."

The number of Canadian kids trying tobacco products has continued to fall, Health Canada's 2004-2005 Youth Smoking Survey reports. "Fewer young people in grades five to nine are trying and using tobacco products," says a news release. “Progress is being made in discouraging youth from taking up smoking, which is one of the goals of the Federal Tobacco Control Strategy." In 2004-05, only 21 per cent of grades 5-9 students had tried any type of tobacco — a 50 per cent drop from the rate in 1994. Students of that age are thought to be the population most at risk for starting to light up. The 2004-05 YSS “was the result of a successful capacity building project funded by Health Canada through a contribution agreement between Health Canada, the University of Waterloo and its partners in a pan Canadian consortium of tobacco control researchers. Based on the success of this project, Health Canada has continued its collaboration with the University of Waterloo and the consortium to conduct the 2006-07 YSS during the upcoming school year. It is expected that the 2006-07 YSS will expand to include grades 5-12, with an estimated 100,000 students expected to participate making this the largest school based survey in Canada.” At UW the project is headed by Steve Manske of the Centre for Behavioural Research and Program Evaluation in applied health sciences.

In Wednesday's Daily Bulletin I identified Roydon Fraser, president of the UW faculty assoiaition, as a professor in systems design engineering, but in fact he's in mechanical and mechatronics engineering. . . . John Van Roon, a coordinator in the cooperative education and career services department for the past five years, will retire officially at the end of September. . . . Voting by UW staff members for a seat on the university's board of governors continues online through September 18. . . .

Finally, Homecoming organizers in UW's alumni office are wondering who might have stolen this banner from its place on the Math and Computer building on Wednesday night. "A frosh prank?" Jude Doble asks — but if so, she's wondering, whose room is big enough to hang a purloined 4-by-14-foot banner? Anyway, the university sign shop is working on a replacement.

CAR

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