Daily Bulletin

First-year students 'feel supported'

That's the dilemma facing Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services). While UW offers assistance to ease new students through that most difficult first term, students don't always avail themselves of the help.

In an effort to understand how to make students aware of services and improve service delivery, first-year experience coordinator Kelly Foley carried out a survey of first-year students living in Ron Eydt Village during the 1997-98 academic year.

In a report on her findings, Foley focuses on three themes: attitudes toward academic and social adjustment, alcohol and its impact, and use of services. The good news, she says, is that "most of our students do feel supported on campus."

On the other hand, worries about workload and fears about academic success "reflect the intense pressure" first-year students feel, echoed by concerns that they may not be in the right program, that they should work harder, and that procrastination is affecting their lives. Those fears peak around the first midterms, but by the winter term have subsided somewhat.

Not only do most students feel they fit in socially at the university -- "an encouraging statistic" -- but most turn to their friends when they need help. When asked during the winter term which persons were most helpful in their transition, 80 per cent cited friends, a significant 46 per cent pointed to families, with less than five per cent turning to professors, advisors, personal counsellors or other university support staff. However, most students feel their professors are accessible.

In the area of drinking behaviour, Foley found "drinkers enjoyed orientation week more than non-drinkers -- a situation we're working hard to change -- and drinkers feel they fit in better socially than non-drinkers." Although alcohol seems to boost social confidence, it clearly has an adverse affect on grades, with greater use of alcohol correlated with fewer marks in the A range, and more in the C to F range.

Among the major areas of concern identified by the survey, says Foley, are the stresses associated with academic fears, which tend to be significantly greater for women students than for their male counterparts, and alcohol use and its impact.

The survey confirms that "students won't deal with anything until it hits them in the face," she adds, suggesting that greater emphasis be placed on "just-in-time" delivery of services, designed to coincide with such peak anxiety periods as the "midterm spike". Other avenues to explore, says Foley, include greater emphasis on peer delivery of services ("students are more likely to listen to students") and awareness programs targetted at parents, on whom students also rely when stressed.

Since the students surveyed in Ron Eydt Village may not be representative of all first-year students at UW, student services staff are considering expanding their study to include surveys or focus groups conducted with other first-year populations, including those who live off-campus or at church colleges.

ICR director appointed

Wong served as associate provost, computing and information systems, at UW from 1989 to 1994, and is known for his research contributions in various aspects of computer networks, including network performance evaluation and information dissemination systems. He has supervised or co-supervised 13 PhD students in computer science or electrical and computer engineering. Formed in 1982, ICR fosters computer research, facilitates interaction with industry, and encourages advanced education in computer science and engineering.

Holidays and other disruptions

Renovations at the University of Guelph Library starting this week and running through August 29 will disrupt access to much of the McLaughlin Building's collections. Folks at UW who want to borrow materials from Guelph are advised not to submit requests for books or articles located in that library. Requests will be handled as usual starting August 30. Collections at the Ontario Veterinary College Library and at the Tri-University Annex will still be accessible. Guelph students will rely more heavily on the UW and Wilfrid Laurier University libraries during the construction period, with a daily shuttle van ferrying Guelph students who wish to do in-person research or borrowing to the collections at the UW or WLU.

Aside from the usual shock of returning to work on a summer Monday morning, staff on the third floor of Needles Hall found themselves without a server yesterday. Martin Timmerman, production support director for IST, reports the nh4.adm disk failed on the Sun server Saturday night, knocking out email and other connections. It wasn't until the server was revived shortly before 11 a.m. that the Daily Bulletin could be posted. Barring other unforeseen glitches, we should be appearing by 9 a.m. again as usual today.

UW web site of the day

"My main research interest is in Surround Sound," writes Jeff Bamford at the beginning of this page. "My MSc thesis was concerned with the Ambisonic SoundSystem." Now he's an acoustic and audio consultant, connected with the audio lab in UW's physics department, and also available for private contracts, including a major one that's keeping him in Toronto these days.

"The whole set of pages started in 1995 when I was finishing up writing my thesis," he writes. I wanted to have my thesis available online for anyone who wanted to read it. I later added to the thesis with a couple of papers that I presented at conferences." (Titles: "Ambisonic Sound for the Masses" and "Ambisonic Sound for Us".)

Says Bamford: "I've received a reasonable number of responses from it. Most notably it brought my work to the attention of others doing work in the same field. In its own way it even led to me assisting a company in the U.K. with a patent in the U.S. They were having difficulting with the examiner in U.S. who was under the impression that this patent was directly obtainable from a previous patent, and hence was unpatentable. The company discovered the work that I did at the University of Waterloo, and I assisted them in defending their new patent."

Among other parts of Bamford's site is a report on some remarkable things he's done with the computer simulation game SimCity 2000.

Barbara Elve
bmelve@nh4.adm.uwaterloo.ca

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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