Share your #uwaterloolife in pictures today

by Kirsty Budd, Student Success Office (SSO).

Show us your #uwaterloolife today!

Post your photos and videos to Twitter, Instagram and Vine (using the hashtag #uwaterloolife) or email us as you go about your day at Waterloo. We’ll share the photos on Storify to build a snapshot of a day in the life at Waterloo.  We’ll post the top 15 submissions from students on the uWaterloo Life facebook page and open it up for a week of voting (October 7-14). The photo with the most likes at the end of the week will win a $500 Retail Services gift card.

Learn more about the 24 hours project.

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"So, you want to be a star?" Smith asks

by Lenore Ramirez, Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA)

Larry Smith, a popular economics professor at the University of Waterloo, is back to continue his lecture series with the second installment: “So, you want to be a Star?” Smith is one of Waterloo’s most active front runners for entrepreneurship on campus and is on a mission to reinvigorate its spirit on campus.

Smith has received more than 1.8M views on YouTube for his 2011 TEDxUW talk "Why You Will Fail To Have A Great Career" and expanded on this theme with the first talk of the series back in July, entitled "What's Your Problem?"

The upcoming lecture, geared primarily towards uWaterloo students, is not just for those who want success in building their own companies, but are looking to get ahead in the workplace as well.

The stunning annual student population growth at Waterloo shows no sign of slowing; with over 7,000 new undergraduates entering this term alone, their success at graduation is a serious goal for the university. We all want our graduates to be successful. As Larry eloquently puts it: “With rising competitive pressures, there are two choices facing every graduate at the University of Waterloo: to be a commodity or to be a star. And we want graduates from the University of Waterloo to be stars.”

With more than thirty years of experience teaching at the university, Smith finds himself frustrated with watching students’ talents wasted. At the lecture, he plans to reinforce his ideas with university-conducted research, observations of the career paths and decisions of some of his past students, as well as actionable techniques to become stars. Smith is confident in the spirit we have here: “Waterloo is the best place to learn how to be a star because we have here the richest array of workplace opportunities offered to our students that is unrivaled anywhere in the world. These workplaces allow you to practice being a star in a way that cannot be done anywhere else on Earth.”

The lecture is being sponsored by Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA), together with VeloCity, and Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology.

The lecture will be held on October 23 at the Theatre of the Arts in the Modern Languages building. Check-in begins at 4:30 p.m., with the lecture taking place from 5:00 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. Register to reserve a seat.

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It's game on with Gamification 2013

Researchers, designers, industry professionals and students will be gathering at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus today for a three-day conference on gamification - the use of game design to make non-game tasks more fun, engaging, and motivating. The conference runs from October 2 to October 4.

Gamification 2013: Gameful Design, Research, and Applications is a new international and interdisciplinary conference organized by researchers from the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo and the GAMER Lab at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and is being held in co-operation with the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Gamification is serious business: the latest projections suggest that half of all companies will use this kind of technology by 2015. In response to these trends, the three-day conference will showcase current academic and industry research in gamification, opening the door for discussion around the growth of the gamification industry. Academic and industry presenters will be providing their insights into the use of game elements to increase employee participation, student and workplace health, learning outcomes, citizen engagement, research participation, and more. More than 33 organizations from 8 countries will be presenting 50 sessions over the course of the event.

The full agenda is available online.

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Highlights from the Equinox Summit

The third plenary of the Equinox Summit: Learning 2030 is underway today. Entitled "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times," the discussion features panelists Greg Butler, Pauline Dixon, Jennifer Groff, Adrian Lim, and moderator Michael Brooks. The event promises "a humorous look at worst and best practices" starting with anecdotes of bad experiences with curriculum, teaching, and learning practices followed by a summary of better solutions.

Tonight's episode of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, "Scientific Literacy for All," will examine how to teach science in a way that will allow students to be engaged.

The livestream for the day's public events is featured below:

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TD Walter Bean Lecture today

Professor Diana Liverman, co-director of the Institute of the Environment and Regents Professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona will be delivering the TD Walter Bean Lecture in the Environment at 5:30 p.m. today.

Professor Liverman is a renowned expert on the human dimensions of global environmental change and the impacts of climate on society. Her lecture "A Delicate Balance: Fighting Poverty in the Age of Climate Change", will discuss her research examining how climate change is threatening decades of development investments in some of the world's most vulnerable communities.

The event will take place in the Humanities Theatre. Tickets are sold out, but a livestream is available.

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