Events

As more employees return to in-person work and commuting patterns continue to evolve, this session invites you to discover the many travel options, supports, and benefits available to make your commute to campus healthier, more affordable, and more sustainable. Whether you’re curious about transit discounts, cycling routes and bike parking, or how to mix and match different modes of travel, you’ll find practical tools and services designed to support your daily journey. You will hear from Region of Waterloo / Grand River Transit staff and City of Waterloo active transportation staff about community services, infrastructure, and employee-specific benefits that shape the daily travel experience for campus members. You’ll also get an introduction to Shift:Mobility, the University of Waterloo’s first Sustainable Transportation Plan, presented by Sustainable Transportation and the Sustainability Office. The plan outlines a coordinated vision for supporting all modes of travel across our campuses, including key outcomes and targets guiding future mobility decisions.

Leadership isn’t just about titles—it’s about how you show up every day. This interactive session will explore what leadership really means , whether formal or informal, and how you can intentionally develop your skills to lead from any role. We’ll challenge traditional notions of leadership, discuss pathways beyond the “obvious” ones, and share practical strategies for building your leadership brand, protecting your well-being, and aligning your values with your work. Whether you aspire to a formal leadership position or simply want to lead by example, this session will help you reflect on your ambitions, identify your strengths, and take actionable steps toward becoming the kind of leader you want to be.

This session will introduce fundamental tips to advance accessibility and disability inclusion in our workplaces and communities. Drawing on lived experience voices of disability and neurodivergence, the presentation will describe the impact of accessibility barriers in the workplace as experienced by members of our University of Waterloo community. The presentation will highlight real-world examples of workplace accessibility barriers and provide guidance on easy practices to advance both accessibility and a culture of disability inclusion. Participants will leave with practical strategies for creating environments that go beyond compliance to eliminate common barriers and promote inclusive and equitable experiences.

When you’re operating in a flow state, it isn’t luck or coincidence. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yan Markson offers a fresh, engaging take on how a growth mindset and self-reinvention can help you spot opportunities, innovate, and thrive in a fast-paced world. Discover how changing your state of mind fundamentally changes your “zone of possibilities.”

This interactive workshop will explore how UWaterloo staff can use student stories to inform various levels of decision making. The intended audience of this session is anyone looking to elevate their work by ensuring their decisions are data-informed, regardless of budget, capacity and resources. Using real examples from the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association (WUSA) the facilitators will demonstrate the different layers of student consultation from low-effort, low budget methods such as boothing and intercepts, to high-effort, high budget methods such as our Representative Survey Platform. Participants will learn how to choose consultation methods based on project goals, timelines, capacity and organizational priorities. By the end of the session, participants will have a stronger understanding of the data needed to support student-centered decisions and how to apply it in practice.

How do we build communities that are connected, caring, and supportive? As we work towards One Waterloo approaches and strive to collaborate across institutional silos, meaningful community-building is essential to honouring our shared humanity and authentic selves. This panel discussion will bring together different affinity groups and community networks across our campuses to explore practical strategies for fostering connection, sharing knowledge, learning from others, and supporting each other. With a focus on building safer spaces for equity-denied communities, the conversation will explore mechanisms for building safer spaces, promoting accessible engagement, and designing inclusive environments – both in-person and virtual.

Institutions often aim to “support” communities, yet well-intentioned efforts can unintentionally reinforce power imbalances by assuming that institutions know what communities need best. This session invites participants to rethink that approach. Grounded in equity-informed and community-engaged practice, this workshop explores how empowering communities can strengthen trust, improve impact, and reduce institutional blind spots. Participants will examine common assumptions embedded in institutional systems, reflect on how stories about expertise and legitimacy are constructed, and consider practical ways to shift from a service-delivery mindset toward one rooted in shared power and community self-determination. Drawing on real-world examples from campus and community-based work, the session offers concrete strategies for working with communities rather than for them, while still meeting institutional responsibilities around accountability and stewardship. This session is designed to be reflective, accessible, and practical. It does not require prior expertise in equity or community engagement and is relevant to staff across roles and units. The focus is not on prescribing one right model, but on inviting critical reflection and offering adaptable principles that participants can apply within their own areas of influence.

Join us to learn about scenarios and sample prompts for common tasks, including an overview of common prompt engineering frameworks to try. Examples include summarizing long e-mails or reports, creating meeting summaries, drafting executive summaries, and even letting AI help you learn about AI! This session is a brief presentation followed by time and space to try things out with assistance from the three workshop coordinators.

It’s time to have a conversation about one of life’s few inevitabilities. Come hear from three panelists who work in the death industry. A funeral director from a local funeral home will speak about the importance of pre-planning and the role that a funeral director can play when a family is grieving. Karry Sawatsky, a registered Death Doula, will explain the kinds of services you could expect from someone with her skills. Tamara Maciel from the University of Waterloo will share some information about the School of Anatomy and the whole-body bequeathal program. Eric Celentano will provide some myth-busting facts about organ donation in Ontario. Each panelist will provide a brief introduction and overview of their areas of expertise, and then we will allow for an open question period.

Electronic and print resources are becoming overpopulated with an abundance of AI created or partially created by AI ebooks. These books could be the resources you are using for research or the newest romcom book you just downloaded, bought or borrowed. Knowing the difference between human authors and AI authors is becoming. Additionally, disclosure of AI generation being used is not always up front. While it is not necessarily a bad thing to interact with AI generated resources, users should be aware of how their resources were created and what to be cautious of in the process.