Five visit Scotland for internships

Five UW students (pictured) are spending this summer taking part in "an exciting program in Scotland aimed at empowering students with the ability to solve real-life business problems".

EDGE, short for Encouraging Dynamic Global Entrepreneurs, "is a unique eight-week international internship program," says Jess Voll of UW's co-op and career services department. EDGE runs from June 19 to August 11 in Scotland's Dunbartonshire (with the University of Glasgow) and in the city of Glasgow (with Glasgow Caledonian University).

Says Voll: "Built on the values of the importance of business education, citizenship, and leadership development, EDGE allows students to benefit from expert education, training, and mentoring to enhance their entrepreneurial skills. In the first two weeks, they will learn about entrepreneurship, enterprise leadership, cross-cultural teamwork, consulting and economic development. The final six weeks will be spent working on consultancy projects for small to medium-sized enterprises in Scotland, to assist them in creating and implementing strategies for future growth and development. By learning how to effectively administer entrepreneurial initiatives, students will have the opportunity to apply their practical skills to achieve societal change."

In total, 64 university students, 32 high school students, and 32 enterprise owners will be putting their heads together on the project this summer. The participants from UW are Kate O'Brien (science-biotechnology/economics), Marina Richardson (science and business/biology), Julia Maruska (science-biotechnology/economics), Bryan Baker (history) and Kunal Gupta (software engineering).

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HR info goes offline for a week

An upgrade to ‘myHRinfo’, UW’s Human Resources Management System, means employees won’t have access to their online pay statements and other information for the next week.

Sandra Hurlburt, assistant director of human resources, says the system will be down from tonight at 4:30 until July 14 (Friday of next week) at 8:30 a.m., while an upgrade is made to the Oracle/PeopleSoft software.

She said HR staff had hoped to “come up with a way to have self-service available to the campus”, but it turned out not to be practical to create a “parallel environment” for a one-week outage of myHRinfo. “Since the upgrade is a relatively short timeframe (and most people would have checked their June pay already) we decided to focus our efforts on getting the upgrade completed as quickly as possible.”

Payday for June was last Friday; the monthly payday for this month is Friday, July 28.

As for staff who are paid biweekly, “most bi-weekly employees will receive a printed pay advice for their pay on July 7” in place of using the online system, she said.

A memo went to departments yesterday assuring them that “All regular payrolls will be processed on schedule. Paydates and deadlines remain the same as published on our website.” But “payroll services such as off-cycle cheques cannot be produced from July 7 to 13, inclusive.”

The one exception to regular scheduling, the memo said, is that “staff who use the casual data entry system will have until July 18 at noon for data input.” That gives an extra day for online reporting of work done by “casual” staff, including many students, between July 2 and July 15; the scheduled payday is Friday, July 21.

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About fireworks, and other notes

I’ve heard a few comments about the fireworks that climaxed the Canada Day celebrations on the north campus on Saturday night, and so has Dana Evans, UW public affairs manager and one of the key Canada Day organizers. “Mostly,” she tells me, “these were that the show wasn't that spectacular, that it was very short, that the ending wasn't sufficient to people's liking, or it was anti-climactic. Really, the show was just about 15 minutes in length (it is usually about 17-18 minutes). I guess this is what happens when you have the same budget you have had for 15 years, and the cost of the product keeps going up!” About the timing of the show in particular: “When it comes down to it, the weather orchestrates much of what we do at the Canada Day Celebrations, no matter how much planning we do. We started the fireworks earlier than originally intended this year as we diligently sought a ‘calm’ period of windy gusts. We received that window at 10 p.m., directly following our headlining band. . . . The show did not end early because of faulty shells or a dangerous situation. The shells that did not make it to full height had gotten slightly wet in the rain throughout the day. We have to work with mother nature when it comes to an outdoor event of this magnitude. Sometimes we get cooperation, this time we had to concede to working within our limits. I do apologize for any disappointment.”

Stan Lipshitz (right) officially retired July 1, ending a career as a faculty member in the department of applied mathematics that began 36 years earlier. He came to UW in 1970 from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he had earned his PhD and been a research assistant. Lipshitz is a specialist in the mathematics of digital signal processing, and is particularly well known for research in acoustics, sound recording and similar topics.

The UW weather station has issued its monthly summary to remind us what the weather was like in June. Well? "Much warmer than average temperatures at night, while the daily high temperatures were only slightly higher than average . . . less than half the precipitation of an average June, 32.8 mm as compared to 80.0 mm. This is the lowest amount of precipitation we have seen during a single month since May of 2005." The warmest it got last month was 31.1 Celsius, and the average daily high was 23.7.

Former UW faculty member C. F. (Fred) MacRae died Monday, at the age of 96. He was a member of UW's department of English from 1963 to his retirement in 1968. Born in Wardsville, Ontario, he was educated at Western, McMaster and Toronto, and taught in Ontario high schools and then at Mount Allison University before coming to Waterloo. He was a specialist in Victorian and Commonwealth literature, and was said to have set up the first course in Commonwealth writing to be taught anywhere in Canada. At UW he was also well known as the long-time chair of meetings of the Arts Faculty Council. He is survived by a daughter and two sons, as well as other family members. A funeral service will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at St. John's Anglican Church, Glencoe, Ontario.

The registrar's office says August 1 will be the official deadline for submission of Intention to Graduate forms for students expecting degrees at fall convocation. . . . Yvonne Thompson, a housekeeper at UW Place since October 1976, officially retired on July 1. . . . Participants in a Skate Ontario provincial training camp are scheduled to arrive today at the Ron Eydt Village conference centre, staying through the weekend. . . .

Michelle Zakrison, president of the Federation of Students, has invited applications for three student positions on the Student Services Advisory Committee and one on UW's Appeal Committee on Traffic and Parking. . . . The UW Recreation Committee is sponsoring "Victorian summer tea in the park" at Woodside National Historic Site this Sunday afternoon. . . . Agnieszka Polanowski (ampolano@uwaterloo.ca) of the UW Centre for Child Studies is interested in speaking to “grade school teachers that can offer their insight into young children’s developing story comprehension and imaginative thinking skills”. . . .

CAR

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