Daily Bulletin

Chechnya exhibit: Orfan Shouakar-stash, one of the organizers of an exhibit this week at the Student Life Centre, discusses the plight of refugees with classical studies student Jarka Kolar. The exhibit continues today from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Grad students surveyed about endowment

An open letter, signed by the GSA board of directors, explains the questionnaire and the idea of a graduate endowment fund:

"During discussions of the Tuition Fee Working Group, the establishment of a Voluntary Graduate Student Endowment Fund was proposed as a potential alternative to large tuition fee increases. The establishment of an endowment fund is not a new idea. Both the GSA Council and GSA Board have discussed this idea on several occasions over the past 4 years. . . .

"If established, this fund would be dedicated to serve the needs of graduate students on this campus. It would allow graduate students, alumni, and corporations to contribute something lasting and important to this university. It is also believed that the creation of an endowment fund for graduate education at the University of Waterloo would permit the development of a reasonable and flexible tuition policy without sacrificing the existing quality of our graduate programs. The lack of an endowment fund is consistently raised as an issue when discussing graduate student tuition fees and graduate student support.

"Endowment funds have proven to have a significant impact on the quality of university programs at this university and many other respected institutions. The University of Waterloo currently faces competitive pressures from universities in Canada and abroad. Endowment funds allow these universities to maintain graduate programs of the highest quality by ensuring funding for outstanding research facilities and funding for scholarships to attract all of the best students. Endowment funds are not perfect but they do permit flexibility in dealing with funding uncertainty.

"The detailed operation of such a fund has yet to be determined. Clearly, graduate students would need to play a significant leadership role in the distribution of the fund. Some potential uses for the fund are the following:

• Graduate student bursaries
• Graduate student scholarships
• Conference travel support
• Special graduate student projects

"The purpose of this letter is to solicit feedback on the principle of establishing an endowment fund and to solicit ideas on its implementation, should it be decided that it is worthwhile pursuing. . . . The results of the questionnaire will be used to determine whether the establishment of a fund should be proposed at this year's Annual General Meeting of the University of Waterloo Graduate Student Association."

Looking forward to summer visitors

They're all among groups who will be holding conferences, camps and rallies this summer at Ron Eydt Village, which turns into a "conference centre" for the spring term each year.

Whether it's 1,000 participants in a Pentecostal church youth conference, or 50 people taking part in a wheelchair sports camp, the conference traffic does two things for UW, says REV manager David Reynolds. It makes the Waterloo name better known in a wide community, and it brings in funds for the residence budget that help keep room costs down for students.

A preliminary list of this summer's conferences is showing 35 events altogether, bracketed by Warrior football camp in the spring (April 22-28) and fall (August 24 through September 1).

The biggest events are religious groups: the Pentecostal youth group May 4-6 and a convention for Cook Communications Ministries June 1-3, each with about 1,000 participants, and the annual Women Alive convention April 28-30. There was a time when Women Alive needed every available room not just in the Village but in the church college residences as well, but it has shrunk in recent years to about 500 overnight participants, Reynolds says.

Other sizeable events through the summer include the Science and Management of Protected Areas Association, here for a week in mid-May, and the Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, meeting at UW for three days in August. And then there's "sort of a sports weekend" for St. John Ambulance cadets over the Civic Holiday weekend in August.

The majority of conferences have little connection with UW except to rent facilities here, but several academic gatherings are also on the list. Among them: a conference on "highly frustrated ferromagnets", hosted by UW's physics department, June 10-15, and the International Symposium on the Role of Erosion and Sediment Transport in Nutrient and Contaminant Transfer, hosted by the school of planning, July 9-14.

Two groups of senior high school students from Hong Kong will be spending almost four weeks at REV, the first from mid-June to mid-July and the second from late July to mid-August. The students will spend two weeks in an English as a Second Language program at Renison College and then a week in Engineering Science Quest before touring parts of Ontario and Québec.

What do you call a week out of class?

And what do you call this interval? Study week (those are the optimists), ski week (optimists of another kind), slack week (pessimists), reading week? I even heard someone call it "March break" the other day -- someone borrowing the expression from the public school system, presumably, and moving it a month early. The university calendar, which may be taken as the official word, calls it "winter study period".

But I'll bet that eventually we'll all be calling it by its American name: spring break. True, spring in southern Ontario is some time off; true, most American universities will be taking their study break next month, not now. (Official dates at Daytona Beach, Florida, source of the advertising photo at right, are March 13-26 this year.) But ever since the 1983 movie "Spring Break", the name is part of the language. And the guys-chase-bikinis, girls-go-wild theme has become part of the culture, reflected in goodness knows how many subsequent cheap comedies.

Going anywhere interesting for spring break, or whatever you choose to call it? Drop me a note; maybe your trip or project or activity deserves a Gazette story in March.

Food outlets close early, and more

The "Chew on This" series for co-op employers is continuing. Today's noon-hour speaker will be David Goodwin of UW's department of English. His topic: "Creating the Right Image -- the Persuasive Art of Visual Design".

The career development seminar series continues today with "Letter Writing" at 1:30 p.m. and "Resume Writing" at 2:30, both in Needles Hall room 1020.

At 12 noon in Humanities room 373, the Women's Association of UW presents a session on "Aromatherapy and Alternative Ways to Good Health", with Bernice Uebele of Nurses in Touch.

A group called UW Students for Life will host "a discussion on abortion and euthanasia" at 6:15 this evening in Math and Computer room 4042. Jane Richard of K-W Right to Life is the guest speaker. The group's president, Alex Cassar (e-mail ancassar@artsmail), can provide more information.

Toronto architect Lisa Rapoport, who incidentally is a UW graduate and an adjunct faculty member in the school of architecture, will be on campus tonight to speak in the Arriscraft Lecture series. Rapoport is a partner in an unusual firm, Plant Architectural Workshop, which is in the process of creating Sweet Farm, described as "an incremental series of landscape interventions on private land in Quebec, using entirely material found on the site. . . . Plant has since been commissioned to carry out an ecological restoration project for the Meadowlands on the New Jersey shore opposite Manhattan." She'll talk about her work at 7:00 tonight in Environmental Studies II room 286. Admission is free.

The Religious Studies Society presents "Baraka" at 7:00 tonight and "Life is Beautiful" at 9:30, in Siegfried Hall, St. Jerome's University. Admission is free.

The volleyball Warriors, having trounced McMaster on Tuesday, find themselves in the OUA West division championships against the University of Western Ontario Mustangs. The first match will be played tonight in London, and the second match at UW on Saturday (7 p.m. in the Physical Activities Complex).

CAR

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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