Soup's on: The University of Waterloo held its second annual Leadership Lunch on Monday, September 16 in South Campus Hall's Laurel Room. The leadership level donors, who contributed $1000 or more, enjoyed a soup-kitchen style lunch as a thank you for their support to the campaign and the community. President Feridun Hamdullahpur and Dean of Arts Doug Peers, this year's Leadership Chair, served up the soup.

Among the 45 attendees were Tim Jackson, this year’s United Way KW Community Champion and Daniela Seskar-Hencic, the United Way KW Chair of the Board.

Jan Varner, the CEO of United Way KW, shared her appreciation for the partnership built between the United Way and the university. Christine Rier from the House of Friendship shared her appreciation for the support shown throughout the campaign. Rier highlighted the many programs supported by the United Way, and attested that each year the House of Friendship helps over 42,000 people in our community.

The University of Waterloo United Way Campaign kicks-off on October 1 and the goal is $240,000. If you are interested in volunteering please contact unitdway@uwaterloo.ca.

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First-year bloggers share their insights

by Andrew Smith, Marketing & Undergraduate Recruitment

For high school students, current Waterloo students are a key source of information about the university. To help high school students understand what life is like at Waterloo, a group of first-year students are blogging about their experiences in classes, residence, and extracurriculars.

Celina and Marieta are two Engineering students who are sharing a blog and will be writing about their co-op work term when they start that in the winter term. Cheryl, a Math student from Kingston, is posting entertaining videos about her experiences at Waterloo. And for the first time, we have a parent blogger! The mom of a first-year Computer Engineering student is sharing her perspective as a parent of a student.

Blogger Jawad says he wanted to blog for two reasons. “I wanted to keep a record of my journey through first-year Engineering and secondly, I wanted to help out high school students just as I had been helped through last year’s bloggers.”

The bloggers, who are volunteers, are working with Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment  and come from a variety of programs and hometowns, including Chicago, Edmonton, Victoria, Scarborough, and Kitchener.

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LITE Seed Grant winners announced

"In collaboration with the Office of the Associate Vice President, Academic, the Centre for Teaching Excellence is pleased to announce that six new LITE Seed Grant projects were funded through the June 2013 competition," writes the Centre for Teaching Excellence's Julie Timmermans. "Congratulations to all the recipients!"

The funded projects are:

• Developing communication and transcultural skills: Steps to enhance first-year language learning and graduate teacher training at UW by Emma Betz of the Faculty of Arts' Germanic & Slavic Studies department;
• Platform for Experiential Learning of Game Theory, by Joel Bilt of Economics in the Faculty of Arts;
• Enhancing Writing and Communications Skills for Earth Sciences Students, by Brewster Connant of the Faculty of Science's Earth and Environmental Sciences department, Judi Jewinski of the Office of the Vice-President, Academic & Provost, and Julia Williams of Renison's English Language Institute;
• Supported Learning Groups, by Katie Damphouse and Mary Lynn Benninger of the Student Success Office's Learning Services unit, Joseph De Juan from Economics, Heidi Engelhardt of Biology, Mary Power from the Centre for Teaching Excellence, and Melissa McNown-Smith from Housing and Residences' Living Learning;
• SHIFT: A Transformation of UW's Printmaking Facilities - Ecology and Instruction, by Tara Cooper of Fine Arts; and
• Assessing Interactive E-Learning Techniques for Teaching Forecasting, by Yulia Gel, Jeanette O'Hara-Hines, and Vyacheslav Lyubchich of the Faculty of Mathematics' Statistics & Actuarial Sciences department.

The LITE Grants are intended to provide support for experimenting with and investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching that aim to foster deep student learning at the university.

Two kinds of grants are made available: the LITE Seed Grants for projects up to $5,000, and LITE Full Grants for projects up to $30,000. Both grant formats emphasize the contribution of the projects to Waterloo's learning community.

There has been a recent change to the annual application deadlines for Seed Grants: instead of three deadlines, there are now two - February 1 and June 1. There is one annual deadline for the LITE Full Grant - October 1.

The Centre for Teaching Excellence runs LITE Grant Information Sessions, and registration details can be found on their website. The next session is scheduled for today.

LITE Seed Grants are available to tenured and tenure-track faculty members, lecturers with a continuing appointment, laboratory instructors and teaching staff, postdoctoral fellows and academic support staff who are scholars of teaching and learning or who are interested in improving deep learning in their course or program. Eligibility criteria for the Seed Grants and Full Grants is available online.

Anyone considering applying for a grant is invited to contact Dr. Julie Timmermans at the Centre for Teaching Excellence via email or by calling extension 32940.

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Housing announces $1.9M ResNet upgrade

by Natasha Jennings.

Over the next 8 months, the department of Housing and Residences will be upgrading wired and WiFi internet services throughout all of its residences, and adding campus WiFi to Columbia Lake Village–North (CLV-North). These upgrades represent a complete refresh of the current network services, and will provide full dual band a/g/n WiFi service in all Waterloo Residences buildings. In addition to tripling the number of WiFi Access Points to address coverage issues, and respond to increasing usage, CLV-North will also be provided with campus WiFi service, eliminating the need for cable modems in the units.

Combined with the $1.2M Campus WiFi Upgrade already under way, these projects represent a $3.1 million investment in services of direct interest to students, and demonstrate the University’s commitment to providing network connectivity for students. 75% of the University’s network traffic is from WiFi and residence networks, and 95% of the usage of WiFi is by students.

The University increases its external internet capacity by about 40% per year, imposes no monthly usage cap on WiFi, and provides free guest access in certain locations.

Campus-wide, free, high speed WiFi enhances teaching and learning activities, gives students easy access to on-campus and off-campus resources, enhances student quality of life, and provides the foundation to develop mobile applications in the future.

All upgrades are expected to be completed by April 2014.

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Remembering Khaled Soudki and other notes

Human Resources has reported that Khaled Soudki (left), Professor and Canada Research Chair in Innovative Structural Rehabilitation in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, died Tuesday.

Soudki joined the university in December 1996 and was an expert in concrete structures, advanced composites, and rehabilitation engineering. He was 48.

A funeral prayer was held at the Waterloo Masjid yesterday afternoon, with burial taking place afterwards. Flags at the university's north campus entrance were lowered in accordance with the university's guidelines.

Friends and colleagues are invited to send condolences to Professor Soudki's family's residence on Friday, September 20 between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. and on Saturday, September 21 from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. For information about the visitations, please contact the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The Federation of Students will be hosting two events for undergraduates to explore volunteer opportunities on campus: the Get Involved Fair on September 18, and Clubs and Societies’ Days on September 19 and 20.

The Get Involved Fair will be held today in the Student Life Centre’s Multi-purpose room from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Undergraduates will be able to interact with representatives from the Feds’ services including The Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and The Women’s Centre to learn about open positions. By contributing their time to helping the services, undergraduates will meet like-minded people from all over campus and inspire positive change.

Clubs and Societies’ Days will be held in the Student Life Centre’s Great Hall from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on September 19 and 20. A wide range of groups will have booths set up and members willing to answer questions. From cultural clubs to art clubs, there will be something for everyone. Over 150 clubs are supported by the Federation of Students. The full clubs listing is available online.

The Centre for Career Action is hosting a Further Education Boot Camp on Saturday, September 28 in the Tatham Centre. The all-day event is open to students and alumni with an interest in furthering their education. Workshops will be facilitated by CCA staff along with guest speakers who have extensive experience in their fields.

There are several field-specific workshops including teaching, dentistry, pharmacy, rehab sciences, law, optometry, health-related careers, naturopathic medicine, veterinary medicine, and medical school. There are also review and strategy sessions for tests like the GMAT, MCAT, DAT, PCAT, OAT, and LSAT.

Full details and registration information is available at the boot camp website.

Waterloo Regional Police have arrested a man after an incident on the university campus early Sunday morning. Charges have been laid, but police are still investigating whether the incident, which resulted in a victim being taken to hospital with head injuries, was the result of criminal activity or misadventure.

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