Nicole McKernan of environmental studies joins other orientation leaders in practising the James Bond Dance, one of the planned show-stoppers at tomorrow's Black and Gold Day. (Photo by Simon Wilson.)

The biggest orientation UW has seen

Student orientation leaders are "doing a wonderful job" with bigger-than-ever crowds of first-year students, says Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services), who made a few comments about the week yesterday before heading off to see "Single and Sexy" and attend Monte Carlo Night in the Student Life Centre.

"Moving people has been a challenge," said Scott, pointing out that there are several hundred more people to feed than last year, more people to take on tours, more people to fit into theatres and quads and hallways. Accidents and problems have been minimal, she said, and "there's been some really interesting things" in the programming, from dean of arts Ken Coates appearing onstage in a puff of smoke, to the fun engineering students can have in a wading pool filled with a polymeric mixture of cornstarch and water. Another highlight, she said, was watching architecture students build horses — full-sized horses — out of corrugated cardboard and duct tape.

Today, the second-last day of orientation, it's pancakes in the morning (at Federation Hall for the off-campus crowd), a campfire in the evening (for first-year environmental studies students), and trips and games and dancing in between. The morning programs are based on residence: while the off-campus group and Villagers hold something called Jump Start Friday, St. Paul’s College students are off to the Elora Gorge. Evening programming is organized by faculty, and includes an engineering scavenger hunt and the applied health studies Sunset Farewell Bash in the Bombshelter pub. (Monte Carlo night photo, left, by Michael Strickland.)

Tomorrow brings university-wide programming (except for Conrad Grebel University College students, who make their traditional weekend outing to Camp Trillium). Most of the 5,000-plus new first-year students will roll out of bed just in time for "Black and Gold Day", involving 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 Guelph.

Tomorrow evening, it's the now traditional Saturday night toga party on the Matthews Hall green, entirely alcohol-free for the third year in a row. The city of Waterloo has given a waiver of its noise bylaw for music until the wee hours, but Scott says there won't be a repeat of last year's experience when houses miles away were rattled by the echoes. "We have a smaller sound system," she said yesterday, "and we've repositioned the stage." For students who don't fancy Roman attire al fresco, there's an official alternative: a comedy and magic performance in Federation Hall.

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

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Update on UW's building boom

by Patricia Bow

If there’s a lot of dust in the air these days, it’s not just because we’ve had a dry summer. Seven construction projects are in progress right now on the UW campuses. Another three are expected to start this fall or next spring.

On the main campus, work on the three-storey, 44,600-square-foot Photovoltaic Research Centre west of the Central Services Building began in March 2006. Researchers in the Centre for Advanced Photovoltaic Devices and Systems are already settling in on the first floor while the upper two floors should be ready to accommodate expanding engineering departments by January.

The three-storey, 57,500-square-foot School of Accountancy addition to Hagey Hall was started in March and, despite a three-week construction strike in June, is still on track for its scheduled completion date in September 2008, says UW architect Dan Parent.

An addition to the PAS Building, in the space next to Environmental Studies I, got under way this summer. The two-storey, 29,700-square-foot building will include enlarged and modernized animal care areas as well as consolidated quarters for arts administration, which will in turn free space in PAS for growth in arts programs. It should be finished by fall 2008.

In the engineering corner of campus, a second-storey 5,700-square-foot addition with offices for faculty and graduate students is being built on top of the multi-media lab in Carl Pollock Hall. It’s expected to be ready by January.

The Quantum-Nano Building will soon start to go up north of Biology I. But first it will go down: a tunnel will be built between the building site and the Student Life Centre starting at the end of October. The main construction will begin in March. The five-storey, 261,000-square-foot building has a projected completion date of September 2010.

On the north campus, the ground was broken in June for a 40,000-square-foot addition to the Optometry Building that will include more study and teaching space, an expanded learning resource centre, and more room for TLC laser clinic. Construction starts this month and is expected to finish in January 2009.

A 65,000-square-foot building called the Research Accelerator Centre is being built at 475 Wes Graham Way in the Research and Technology Park. After completion next spring it will provide “swing space” for temporarily displaced UW groups. The first to move in, until their own buildings are ready, will be the Institute for Quantum Computing and possibly the School of Pharmacy administration, which will have to leave 195 Columbia Street West ("the B.F. Goodrich building") before the university’s lease on BFG expires in April.

On the east campus, in parking lot B, construction is expected to start on Engineering V next spring and could be completed in two years. This six-storey, 150,000-square-foot building will make more room for electrical and computer engineering, mechanical and mechatronics engineering, and systems design engineering, and for the Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems. It’s the first phase in a planned engineering expansion that might also include a second building near Doug Wright Engineering and a third building east of Engineering V.

On the downtown Kitchener health sciences campus, work on the 120,000-square-foot School of Pharmacy, which began in June 2006, was delayed by crane operators’ and general labourers’ strikes, pushing the building’s projected opening from January 2008 to May 2008. When students, faculty and staff move in, they will have access to lecture rooms, labs and offices from the basement up to the third floor. By September 2008, the top floor and the tower will be completed. On the same campus, McMaster University’s 60,000-square-foot Michael G. DeGroot School of Medicine building is scheduled to start this October and to finish in September 2009. At some time in the future, the two buildings could be linked by a third structure.

All together, these projects will add more than 830,000 gross square feet of academic space to the university —equivalent to about two and a half times the size of the Davis Centre. That’s a lot of activity, but it still falls short of the more than one million gross square feet built in the late 1960s.

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A few other notes for a Friday

"Population aging is occurring worldwide," says Gloria Gutman of Simon Fraser University, and a truer word was never spoken, even if first-year students do appear to some eyes to get younger every year. Gutman will be speaking at UW on Monday, in a talk sponsored by the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging and the Hallman Visiting Professorship series i applied health sciences. The director of the aging institute, kinesiology professor Mike Sharratt, observe that Gutman "has provided Canadian and international leadership in the area of gerontology for over 25 years. She has influenced an entire generation of researchers working to enhance the quality of life for the oldest segment of our population." Her lecture — "Global Aging and the Continuum of Care" — is scheduled for 3:30 Monday in the Clarica Auditorium in the Lyle Hallman Institute building. She will, an abstract says, "address some of the myths and misconceptions that underpin apocalyptic demography. She will also discuss the needs and preferences of current and future cohorts of seniors with respect to the shelter-care continuum and the application of new technology." Admission is free, but since there's limited space, reservations are encouraged: phone ext. 32010.

The faculty association has completed its survey of professors about workload and merit pay, the latest issue of its newsletter reports. David DeVidi, the president, sums up the findings: “The variation in teaching loads across campus is quite dramatic. In some departments the normal load is three courses per year, while in some others it is three per term. ... There is also dramatic variation in the criteria according to which faculty members get TA support for their courses. ... Of course, it is a gross oversimplification to equate workload with course load. The impression that workloads are very heavy and steadily increasing is very general, and this is thought to cause problems in various ways — for instance, increasing undergraduate teaching loads make it much more difficult to keep up a research profile that will attract the grants that will fund all the extra graduate students the University wants to admit, and increasing time commitments at work make it very difficult to keep a sensible work-home balance. ... Many people perceive the work distribution within their academic units as unfair in one way or another.” More detailed information is promised on the FAUW web site.

The human resources department reports that a number of staff members officially retired on September 1. Among them: Barbara Evans, editorial assistant in the department of geography, who joined UW's staff in September 1987; Valerie Grieve, administrative assistant in systems design engineering, who had been at UW since July 1988; Brian Cartlidge, financial administrator and swimming coach in the athletics department, a staff member since August 1992.

And . . . with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approaching, there's an invitation from the nearest synagogue to campus, Temple Shalom (a Reform congregation): "All Jewish students, faculty and staff are invited to high holiday services at Temple Shalom. If you are interested in coming, please send a message to president Doug Dykaar at president@templeshalom.ca to arrange a ticket." The first service, Erev Rosh Hashanah, will be held Wednesday evening at 7:30.

CAR

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