Daily Bulletin

Monday, September 29, 1997

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

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More than 4,000 in first year

Figures from the registrar's office confirm what people have been saying all month: there's a big crowd of first-year students here this fall. And numbers are going up day by day, according to Peter Burroughs, director of admissions. On Thursday he issued a statistical report showing a total of 3,943 full-time students in first year; by this morning the number had hit 4,054.

The deans had set 3,730 as the overall target for the university. (That doesn't include 60 positions in optometry, as students can't enter optometry direct from high school.)

Burroughs adds that there are about 70 more students "who have preregistered but have not yet registered" -- maybe they're here and maybe they're not -- and "there are also a number of year 1 students who may withdraw before November 1 or whose status with respect to year and term of study is uncertain at this time." November 1 is the official date for counting fall term enrolment.

Mathematics has the biggest bulge in its first-year enrolment, but five of the six faculties are reporting more students than they had listed as their targets. Here's how things look, according to Burroughs's latest figures:

Mathematics: 975 students compared to a target of 830 (including 151 students in regular programs, where the target was only 75).
Science: 704 students compared to a target of 600. The biggest crowds are in some co-op programs, notably science and business (82 compared to a target of 55) and biology (89 compared to 60).
Engineering: 796 first-year students, against a target of 745. Civil engineering is the most crowded, with 105 students compared to a target of 85.
Environmental studies: 307 students, against a target of 281. Environment and resource studies is showing a particular boom, with 81 first-year students where the target was 60.
Arts: 1,012 students, where the target was 1,002. A bulge is particularly obvious in the regular program, where last week's report shows 529 students against a target of 478.
Applied health sciences: 260 students, against a target of 267, make AHS the only faculty where the goal hasn't quite been reached.

"Admission is a crap shoot, and this year we won in spades," registrar Ken Lavigne told the UW senate last week. The Kitchener-Waterloo Record had a lively story last week about crowded classrooms at both UW and Wilfrid Laurier University, including what's said to be record enrolment in UW's biggest single course, Psychology 101.

Hot stuff on campus today

A two-day "fire training facility design workshop" is running on campus today and tomorrow, attracting fire chiefs, designers and others interested in creating the physical facilities where firefighters train. It's being given by two veteran firefighters (chief Jim Hancock and training director Don Trask, both of the Kitchener department) and two UW faculty members.

The UW people involved are Al Strong of mechanical engineering, whose lifetime of research in fluid mechanics has led him to work in such fields as fire enclosure ventilation, and Beth Weckman of the same department, whose specialty is combustion, and who's been working with the Kitchener department for half a dozen years on training facilities and in research on how fire spreads.

"Fire is unpredictable and full of unknowns -- that's what makes it so interesting," Weckman says. "Our aim is to gradually collect enough information to see trends in the correlation between an action and the fire's response." Last year she made her own first foray into a burning building, at the training facility operated by the Cambridge fire department, and was impressed: "The turnout gear is stiff and the breathing apparatus is heavy," she says. "It's hard to move. You lose all your senses: your hearing is muffled, and your vision is gone because of the smoke."

This other news, on Michaelmas

The teaching resource office is presenting a telelearning seminar today. Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza of Brazil speaks on "Explanation Systems in Multi-Agent Applications", at 3:30 in Davis Centre room 1331.

The Imaginus folks bring their annual poster sale to the Student Life Centre, today through Friday, according to flyers that can be spotted across campus.

The catering branch of food services is offering a reward "to the department that turns in the most missing equipment (number of items) during the month of October. Check your cabinets, closets and under desks for baskets, cups, trays, etc. Call us at ext. 3198 and we'll pick it up. The winner will receive a choice of one of the following: catering goodie basket or catering gift certificate."

The football Warriors suffered their second defeat in a row on Saturday, losing 21-15 to the University of Toronto Varsity Blues. Other sports scores on hand so far: the field hockey Athenas defeated Trent 3-0; the baseball Warriors split a double-header with Guelph, losing 4-3 but coming back to win 12-6 behind pitcher Matt Beelen.

And my apologies to early readers of Friday's Bulletin, who will have been told that the Downey Tennisfest was happening on Sunday. It took place on Saturday, and the error was corrected in time for most readers to get the right information.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY September 28, 1977: Celebrating its new automated circulation system, the library launches a three-day amnesty on the return of overdue books.

September 29, 1987: The Engineering, Math and Science library reopens as the Davis Centre library. September 29, 1992: A ceremony launches the Walter Bean Visiting Professorship in the Environment with a $1 million gift from Canada Trust.

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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