Wednesday, May 25, 2016

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• Former Governor General speaks on campus today
• Event explores the sum of English + Innovation
• Food Services adds spice (and onions) to the student experience at Waterloo
• Collaboration helps build the best co-op experience
• Wednesday's notes

Former Governor General speaks on campus today

The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson will be speaking on campus today on what it means to belong.

In her remarks, entitled "Belonging: Diversity, Capacity, and Civilization," Clarkson will be discussing the importance of belonging in shaping today’s society.

The talk expands on her highly successful Massey Hall Lecture series and book Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship. 

As Canada's 26^th Governor General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson served as Canada's viceregal representative from 1999 to 2005 and is a noted author and broadcaster.

The free lecture will be followed by a question and answer period.

Copies of Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship will be available for purchase before and following the lecture.

Doors at the Humanities Theatre open at 5:30 p.m. with the lecture beginning at 6:15 p.m., followed by the book signing at 7:30 p.m.

The University of Waterloo is hosting the event along with the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation and the House of Friendship.

Event explores the sum of English + Innovation

On Thursday, June 2, the success of the University of Waterloo’s English Language and Literature students, their presence in the local community, and the insight and imagination they bring to the fields of writing, media and communications will be celebrated in downtown Kitchener at the English + Innovation showcase.

“Waterloo Region continues to experience rapid change, especially as the new Innovation Corridor with the City of Toronto develops,” says Kate Lawson, professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature. “Our English + Innovation event highlights the ways in which good communicators are crucial to the content creation, documentation, and usability that this evolution requires.”

English + Innovation will feature a range of projects by English students that demonstrate how their field relates to high tech. Students will showcase their research and development on the technological frontiers of gaming, geolocation, creative media, and user documentation, to name but a few. Presentations include:

• Places, Please!: Capturing Theatricality at the Stratford Festival in Video Games
• Around the Clock: Robot Autonomy, Robotic Labour, and the Time of Work
• Everybody’s Everybody’s Autobiography: Radio, Gertrude Stein, and the Modernist Soundscape
• Alice and Schrodinger’s Excellent Adventure
• Gendered or Neutral? Considering the Language of HCI (Human Computer Interaction)
• The Female Voice: .NET and .NET Core Documentation in Light of Gender
• February 23, 2016: Specimens from the Kitchener Public Library Makerbot
• Mind/Control: Neurofeedback, Gameification, Mindfulness

A moderated panel of English alumni and employers from the tech sector will speak, including:

• Iain Klugman (President and CEO of Communitech)
• Elizabeth Chestney Hanson (Manager of Strategic Communications at OpenText)
• Patrick Hofmann (User Experience Designer, Google Australia)
• Richard Lander (Principle Program Manager Lead on the .NET Team, Microsoft)
• Gian Mancuso (Product Designer, D2L Corporation)
• Sherry McMenemy (Director Global Intranet at Volaris Group)
• Scott Wahl (Director of Software Projects at Dematic)

The event takes place at the Tannery on June 2 from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. with the program getting underway at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 per person or $160 for a table of eight. Tickets can be reserved on the event website.

Food Services adds spice (and onions) to the student experience at Waterloo

This is the latest in a series of #UWStratPlan stories that profile some of the initiatives that are part of the robust efforts to implement the Strategic Plan. 

Whether the omelet hits the pan or falls to the floor doesn’t matter. What really counts is the cooking lesson that got it into the air in the first place.

Twice a year, Food Services at the University of Waterloo hosts the UW Superfoods Cooking Show at Federation Hall — Fed Hall.  

"We’ll get 200 students in here, and they’ll watch while a chef does a three-course demonstration," says Lee Elkas, Food Services director. "We’ll have a dietician come in to talk about how to select vegetables, how to balance your lifestyle with healthy food and how to moderate the junk food."

Students then circulate among cooking stations set up around the hall. Trading forks for spatulas, they take some professional advice from a chef and whip up an omelet.

Fed Hall isn’t a nightclub any longer, but it remains committed delivering a memorable student experience — one of eight themes in the University’s Strategic Plan.

Built and operated by the Federation of Students (Feds), Fed Hall opened in 1984 when there were few entertainment options on campus or off. It eventually came under University ownership and was leased back to Feds for a nominal fee.

Fed Hall closed for a couple of years after the University decided not to renew the lease past 2012. It re-opened in  January 2015 after an extensive renovation that installed a new kitchen for Food Services’ catering operation, and transformed the building into a venue for University and community events.

When the main hall isn’t booked, students can use the second-floor gallery as study space.

In addition to helping students eat well, Food Services enriches the Waterloo experience in another important way — employment. Of the 400 part-timers it hires for the fall, winter and spring peak season, 90 per cent are UW students, Elkas says.

Read the rest of the article on the Strategic Plan website.

Collaboration helps build the best co-op experience

by Andreea Perescu

The 2016 Campus Recruiting Forum (CRF) brought employers and campus experts together for a two-day collaboration on the best ways to recruit top student talent. The event was sponsored in part by Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA) at Waterloo, and co-hosted with Wilfrid Laurier University.

“This is a place where recruiters are looking for insight on how to get the best students,” said Emily Burgess, marketing outreach coordinator at CECA whose efforts behind the scenes helped organize Waterloo’s successful contribution. “We are the ones that are supposed to be providing the best students. The CRF is an opportunity to see what [the employers] are not getting out of our co-op system, and where we can improve.”

As a networking platform, the forum made it possible for recruiting professionals to bounce ideas off each other and participate in a variety of interactive panels throughout the day. One panel featured Suman Armitage, director of communications and marketing at CECA, who provided her expert advice on connecting with students and increasing employer success. The panel was rounded out with representatives from Laurier, University of Guelph and Conestoga College.

The panel was live tweeted by @HireWaterloo with insight on how employers can utilize on-campus resources and build brand visibility. You can read Suman’s 7 Ways to Land Top (Student) Talent blog recently featured on the Vancouver Economic Forum’s website.

Wednesday's notes

The Canada Day Celebration is still looking for volunteers for the annual July 1 festivities.

There are a number of positions available, including spirit squad members, artistic face painters, customer services representatives, stage hands and more. All positions offer the opportunity for hands-on participation in Waterloo's Canada Day Celebration. All volunteers will receive a t-shirt to wear during the event and a meal will be provided.

Please sign up online to apply to both Executive Level and Member Level volunteer roles. Log in with your CAS credentials, clicking on "Jobs" and then scrolling down to Community Events and clicking on the various Canada Day Celebration volunteer opportunities.

The deadline for applications to Waterloo’s Chronic Disease Prevention Initiative (CDPI) $10,000 seed grants is Monday, June 6. Check the CDPI website for more details about the grant opportunity.

Employers on campus next week hosting employer information sessions include: Vancouver Economic, SAP, Vena Solutions, Yahoo, Yelp, Stripe, Redfin, A9 and Capital One. Visit the employer information sessions calendar for more details.