All Posts Tagged With: "arts"

Business? Engineering? Arts? You may be surprised.

Courtesy of NSSE. Click to enlarge.

Engineering students have been known to curse friends in other majors. That’s because they often spend hours sitting in their residence rooms sweating over near impossible differential equations while their non-engineering roommates leisurely read a couple chapters and then head out to party.

Then again, ask an arts major how hard they’re working and they’ll start rattling off the number of essays they have due.

But finally, it’s settled. Engineering students study more. The new release of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows that North American Engineering students spend 19 hours per week, on average, preparing for class. Arts, humanities and biology majors study 17 hours per week. Social science and business students study only 14 hours.

But don’t assume all non-engineers are slacking. Business students study the least, but they aren’t socializing any more. Instead, they work seven hours more per week at paying jobs. In fact, if you add jobs and study together, business students work the most—30 hours per week. Social sciences students work the least overall (27 hours). Engineering students are in the middle (28 hours).

NSSE, considered the gold standard of student surveys, involved polling of senior year students at 683 U.S. and 68 Canadian institutions in 2011. It had a response rate of 33 per cent.

Would you want your heart surgeon to be a ‘creative entrepreneur’?

Can a 4.0 GPA be a bad thing? A guest lecturer in one of my courses thinks so. In a lecture about “Mistakaphobia,” he argued that part of life–and therefore a part of being a university student–is making mistakes and growing from your experiences, taking risks and learning how to live in the real world. Perfection isn’t something you should strive for, because without mistakes you can’t learn anything. Instead of aiming for that 4.0 GPA, university students should accept mistakes as “opportunities.” It’s all part of a “creative entrepreneur” mentality.

I don’t have a 4.0 GPA, but it’s not for a lack of trying. And although I don’t know anyone who would disagree with the idea that making mistakes and taking risks are all part of living in the real world, as someone who’s planning on applying to med school next year, I need the highest marks possible if I want any hope of actually making it in. I’m sure anyone else who’s getting ready to apply to graduate school or professional school feels the same way. The problem is, there are plenty of applicants with 3.8+ GPA’s who aren’t nerdy little hermits with underdeveloped social skills and a lack of creativity. Out of the thousands of people applying to med school every year, plenty of them have high marks, but I don’t assume a correlation between high marks and low levels of “creativity.”

In the tutorial that took place after the lecture, where students and TAs were able to discuss the ideas with each other, I found it interesting that a lot of people seemed to think it had to be one way or the other: embracing a 4.0 GPA is somehow a rejection of the arts, and it’s only smug science students who get high grades. Discipline and a work ethic shouldn’t be rewarded–they should be stigmatized. If you have anything higher than a 2.8 GPA, you’re not creative or intellectual. You’re afraid to take risks and live in the real world–a robot who’s just following instructions. Part of a flock of sheep.

Yeah, sitting in that tutorial, I felt like I was in enemy territory. It was very uncomfortable. Kind of like if you were sitting in the middle of a crowded cafeteria and suddenly, everyone started declaring Holy Allegiance to the Underground Mole King, and all traitors should be TORTURED AND MUTILATED AND CHEESE GRATED TO DEATH. It was one of those, “I wish I had a jet pack” kind of moments.

I also found it interesting that some of the students also had obvious contempt for the sciences, and seemed to think that all science students are disrespectful of the arts. Like we all get together in Nerd Conferences and make fun of arts students behind their backs, and say things like, “How can a course in philosophy lead to a viable career? If a textbook doesn’t contain at least a couple equations and words like ‘entropy,’ it’s a joke.” At least, I know none of my friends in the biomedical sciences think that way.

Not to mention, med schools are increasingly embracing non-traditional backgrounds. More and more schools are dropping science prerequisites and MCAT requirements. And every med school across Canada looks at more than just marks. Extracurricular activities, life experience and even essay-writing skills are often evaluated, and although the exact weighting formula varies depending on the school, all of these non-academic criteria are important. Of course, it’s wrong to think that a doctor with a background in the arts would automatically be more creative, innovative and people-oriented  than someone from the sciences. Just like it would be wrong to assume that someone with a science background is automatically harder working and more disciplined.

The point is, it doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. In a field like medicine, the ‘entrepreneur’ mentality is definitely a valuable asset. After all, lots of scientific discoveries were mistakes to begin with. And new, innovative surgical techniques are the result of experimentation. But I’m sure those medical researchers and surgeons had high GPAs.

At least I feel better about my physics and organic chemistry marks now. Apparently I can make a political stance out of it. Any low marks I’ve ever gotten were a deliberate choice. I was learning how to be an entrepreneur.

Mind you, if I was having open heart surgery, I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be a “creative entrepreneur.” I’d want them to be a perfectionist who had a 4.0 GPA. Someone who is afraid to make mistakes.

Only 61 per cent of Ontario professor think that teaching is important to their university

The current focus on research–and securing research funding–at Canadian universities could be taking away from teaching. According to a new survey by the Ontario Government’s Higher Education Quality Council only 61 per cent of the professors “believe that teaching is important or very important to their institution” and  “70 per cent of professors surveyed believe research has a bigger payoff than teaching in enhancing reputation, respect of peers, and access to funds.”

When it comes to teaching the report says that many professors fount that “little formal support was available when they began their careers, although the survey indicates that teaching support is considered especially critical in the early professional years. Most said they learned about teaching through practice as a graduate student and
continue to learn about postsecondary teaching through practice and peer consultation.”

While this should be concerning to everyone, especially those of us currently pursuing an undergraduate degree, it’s hardly surprising. Sooner or later, everyone in university will encounter professors who lack basic teaching skills and who are far more interested in telling your class about their research than teaching the course material.

In a press release the executive director of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, Henry Mandelbaum, blamed the over-focus on research on the government. “Our universities are chronically underfunded, and that means administrators must chase any additional money they can find,” Said Mandelbaum. “As a result of federal and provincial government policy, much of this new money is for research. It’s therefore not surprising that teaching has taken a backseat at many of our institutions. Funding universities adequately would eliminate this imbalance.”

But there’s more to it than that. Universities don’t really value good teaching. Sure, there are a handful of teaching awards available to professors but tenured professors know that when it comes to promotions, published research counts far more than teaching skills.

One of the other problems with research funding is that it disproportionately goes to “hard” science. Three quarters of federal funding for science and technology go to “natural science and engineering,” with the other quarter going to “social sciences and humanities.” This might not be such a problem if universities and professors weren’t so motivated by research funding. The end result of this imbalance is that “hard” science programs have more funding than their counterparts in the arts, universities value these programs more and science professors have more opportunity to secure grants, publish and get promoted. The problem is that there are more students in the arts than any other program.

Research is always going to be a big deal for universities and a point of pride. I briefly attended the University of Winnipeg a few years ago and I remember the university promoting itself by saying that since it was an undergraduate university, undergraduates would have greater oppertunity to participate in research. The other day, McGill principal, Heather Munroe-Blum told CBC radio that the university’s focus on research and large number of graduate programs would benefit undergrads through some sort of trickle down effect.

This debate won’t be going anywhere soon, the Quality Council’s next research projects will look into improving teaching.

Hi everyone, This is my introductory post for Maclean’s OnCampus. As my awesomely creative blog title suggests, I hope to pamper you with campus news about cool extracurricular activities, artsy going-ons, outstanding cultural leaders, culinary wonders, fashion funsies and anything else hip and exciting. Everyone could use a healthier, more balanced brain. Sure, the school [...]

Hi everyone,

This is my introductory post for Maclean’s OnCampus. As my awesomely creative blog title suggests, I hope to pamper you with campus news about cool extracurricular activities, artsy going-ons, outstanding cultural leaders, culinary wonders, fashion funsies and anything else hip and exciting.

Everyone could use a healthier, more balanced brain. Sure, the school books are important, but so is building social networks and exploring your inner Picasso. Or Jane Austen. Or David Cronenberg

Personally, I like to tap into the creative juices of Lady Gaga.

Just joking. Or am I?

But before you answer that question, a bit about me: I’m currently a Master of Journalism student at the University of British Columbia. I’m also a summer arts and features reporter for the Victoria Times Colonist.

You can find some of my other freelance work here, here, and here.

Oh, and follow me on Twitter: @AmandaAsh. Sometimes I say really great stuff in 140 characters.

How did Pratt go from engineering student to respected, professional artist?

Christopher Pratt is arguably one of Canada’s greatest living painters. His distant, clinical landscapes are at the same time modern and wholly timeless. I’m certainly no art critic, but when I saw a retrospective show at Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-arts, I was awestruck. Here was a real artist. Someone who belongs very much to a place (Newfoundland), but speaks, through sparse rural depictions, to a certain universality. That doesn’t do him justice though. You have to see his work (and I mean wall upon wall of it) to really understand its force.

But how did someone like that get a start in life? How did he go from being a pre-engineering student to a respected, professional artist?

The answer is simple. He saw that a life in art was entirely possible in his own environment. And this wasn’t easy. He grew up in a place where there were, as he says, no art galleries, no professional artists and no understanding that one could even make a living through painting of all things.

But Pratt persevered. He did a year of engineering, then switched to pre-med, then finally settled on an Arts undergrad… until he dropped out a year and a half later. In fact, his educational record does not show any sign of the committed professionalism he’d later develop as an artist.

One thing that kept him going were his artistic inspirations. Alex Colville, for example, the well-known artist, taught him briefly at Mount Allison in New Brunswick. And the image of Colville – his paintings showing the world over – who could “live in a little house, have a family with three or four kids and walk to church every Sunday” was indelible. It showed Pratt that it was possible to become a serious artist while staying close to one’s roots. You didn’t have to be brash, or urban, or complicated.

It was possible to make a career quietly, keeping to oneself and working on one’s art.