Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Waterloo joins HeForShe Impact 10x10x10 initiative

The University of Waterloo has been selected as part of the UN Women’s HeForShe Impact 10X10X10 initiative – the only Canadian organization – alongside governments, leading universities, and global businesses, according to an invitation circulated by the President's Office yesterday. 

"The University of Waterloo is committed to achieving comprehensive, long-term, sustainable gender equity by developing innovative equity programming aimed at young girls right through senior leadership. This initiative inspires men and boys in the fight for gender equity, galvanizing support for social change in Canada and around the world," says the president's memo. "We all have a role to play. First, we need your support to launch this exciting initiative. Please come celebrate and support the University of Waterloo in launching our commitment to #HeForShe."

"Be at BMH Green on May 5, 2015 at 10:00 a.m., as we stand together and join this global solidarity movement for gender equity."

More information about Waterloo’s Impact 10X10X10 commitments will be available on Tuesday, May 5.

"Gender equality is everyone’s issue. This is our moment. Join us and make an IMPACT," the president's memo concludes.

Attendees are invited to register on the Impact 10X10X10 website.

Building better relationships with our institutional partners

By Clare Flood & Shabnam Ivković.

As part of a hybrid institutional exchange agreement, Waterloo co-op students undertake work terms at Soochow University in China, while Soochow’s students come to Waterloo for academic terms.

Over 2014/15, five high-ranking Soochow representatives spent a year at Waterloo as part of a knowledge exchange exercise funded by their university.  One of their goals was to better understand our co-op model. Five 1- to 2-hour sessions were designed and hosted by Co-operative Education & Career Action’s (CECA) International team, and one by the Centre for Career Action. Each session targeted a different aspect of the co-op program with the intent of gaining a better understanding of the working culture at Soochow, and addressing international employment concerns, if any. The six sessions, held over six months, included a general overview of CECA, how to write a competitive job description, how to orient your co-op students on their first few days, UWaterloo’s risk management training for students on international work terms, the value of account plans, and an overview of the Centre for Career Action.

The five Soochow delegates left every session feeling better informed and very thankful for the opportunity to better understand CECA’s co-op process. At our end, we gained better insight into Soochow’s internal processes for hiring our co-op students as part of the hybrid exchange agreement. All of this led to building a more cohesive relationship with one of Waterloo’s important institutional partners!

Water Institute hosts symposium, lecture

Tomorrow, the Water Institute will host its 2015 Research Symposium, which will showcase the breadth of Waterloo's water research and provide an opportunity for organizations and individuals to interact with researchers and students.

The research symposium is open to faculty and students of the University of Waterloo or other institutions, and to external organizations or individuals.

The program consists of an opening plenary that features remarks by Bob Gilham, executive director of the Waterloo Institute, and a panel discussion chaired by Professor Susan Elliott entitled "Water Security for First Nations in Canada" that includes Irving Leblanc, special advisor for housing, infrastructure and emergency issues management for the Assembly of First Nations, Professor Steve Hrudey of the University of Alberta, and Merrell-Ann Phare, executive director for the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources. Following the plenary are several breakout sessions, a graduate student poster exhibition in the Mathematics 3 atrium, and a session on emerging scholars that include several Three-Minute Thesis presentations and the presentation of the 2014/2015 Stantec, Golder Associates and AECOM graduate scholarships. More breakout sessions are scheduled on urbanization and nanotechnology tracks, the former chaired by Professor Philippe Van Cappellen, and the latter chaired by Professor Arthur Carty.

Immediately following the symposium at 4:00 p.m. is the Water Institute's 2015 Distinguished Lecture, which will be delivered by Dr. Sunita Narain, the Director General, Centre for Science and Environment based in New Delhi, India, entitled "Challenges for Water Security in the Poor's World." Narain's lecture will address the fact that "large parts of the developing world are faced with huge and mounting water challenges. On the one hand, there is scarcity and competition for the resource between current agricultural users and new users in industry and urban areas. On the other hand, there is increasingly variability in rainfall, leading to floods and droughts because of now more visible climatic changes. Current technologies for water and waste management are unaffordable and therefore, unsustainable. What is the way ahead? What should research be advising policy and practice to build a new water future?"

Professor Narain has been with the Centre for Science and Environment since 1982 and is a writer and environmentalist. in 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India and is the recipient of the World Water Prize for her work on rainwater harvesting in its policy influence in community-based water management.

The Distinguished Lecture will take place in Room 1006 of Mathematics 3.

Wednesday's notes

Employers on campus next week hosting employer information sessions include: BlackBerry, Kik Interactive, Inc., Noom Inc., Wish, Loblaw eCommerce, 500px, CGI, LinkedIn Corporation, Shopify, Wattpad and Amazon.

There's still time to check out the MFA Thesis exhibitions at the University of Waterloo's Art Gallery as the show runs until Saturday, May 2.

In Gallery One is Sift by artist Sarah Kernohan. Sift is a drawing installation influenced by the artist’s experiences in nature, most recently a five-day hike along the Lagavegur Trail in Iceland. The drawings recall this walk through a landscape that was at times out-of-focus, while at others absolutely clear, providing the landscape with an evocative and ever-shifting identity. Each drawing represents a process of trying to understand and re-create the way that sediment settles and deposits on snowfields after a season of storms.

Kernohan is completing her MFA at Waterloo and received her BFA from OCAD University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and is the recipient of several awards; including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, University of Waterloo President’s Scholarship and grants from the Ontario Arts Council. She participated in the Keith and Win Shantz Fellowship and worked in London UK with the collaborative Peles Empire and painter Oliver Osbourne. She currently lives and works in Kitchener.

In Gallery Two is Small Worlds by Liz Little. Small Worlds is an installation of wall drawing that explores the possibilities of shape and colour through repetition and scale. Combining drawing materials with printmaking techniques, Little uses her hand and body to replace the printing press in the creation of uniquely reproduced shapes. Movement and rhythm are initiated by repetition, and through colour there is the opportunity to examine the relationship between the viewing experience and perception, cognition and sensation. Little is interested in the subjective experience, and how both brain and body are involved in the relationship between artwork and audience.

Little is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on repetition, colour, and abstraction. Currently an MFA candidate at Waterloo, she received a BFA with Distinction from Concordia University in 2010. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Germany and is part of national and international private collections. As a recipient of the Keith and Win Shantz Fellowship in 2014, she assisted the artist Ciara Phillips in Glasgow, Scotland. She is the recipient of several scholarships and awards, including the Sylvia Knight Award in Fine Arts and the Bill Watson Memorial Award for Printmaking. She currently lives and works in Kitchener.

Exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The University of Waterloo Weather Station's annual weather contest has a winner, with the temperature hitting the 20-degree mark on Monday, April 13. "After a cold winter the contest ended the same day as last year," says the note from the weather station. "Congratulations to Theresa McLachlan for only being 15 minutes off the correct time of 11:45 a.m. when the temperature first hit 20.0 C." In second place was Joanne Weishuhn-Lee.

The annual challenge is to guess the exact date and time the weather station first registers a temperature of 20.0 degrees Celsius or greater.

The winners will also become members of the Waterloo Weather Station Contest Hall of Fame.