All Posts Tagged With: "Laurentian University"

Hundreds of students. Millions of views.

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of students at Canadian universities have been singing and dancing their way through elaborate lip dub videos. Here are our favourite Top 10, from the most to least viewed.

1. I Gotta Feeling, Université du Québec à Montréal, 10,353,000 views.
This lip dub of the Black Eyed Peas dance hit made these communications students famous when it was picked up around the world.

2.The Worst Test, University of Toronto, 3,019,000 views.
In a first-year engineering test, the sounds of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise start blasting through the lecture hall and a couple of students stand on desks, rapping a song called I’m an Engineering Failure. Skule Nite, an engineering musical revue, takes credit.

3. Raise Your Glass etc., University of British Columbia, 1,865,000 views.
It starts out with a nod to Old Spice Man and then hundreds of students mouth Pink’s party anthem and other songs. There’s a galloping horse, a cameo from Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench, martial arts, ballet and an underwater scene in the school pool.

4. Carol of the Bells, Algonquin College, 543,000 views.
It’s December exam week and students are cramming when Darth Vader shows up and conducts a choir belting out Carol of the Bells. This best-ever study break was courtesy of broadcasting students.

5. Dynamite, McGill University, 466,000 views.
Students and researchers at the Goodman Cancer Research Centre show off their labs with this slick remake of Taio Cruz’s tune, with its fitting refrain, “I wanna celebrate and live my life.”

6. Gangnam Style, York University, 368,000 views.
David Kim dances his way through lecture halls, over a Tim Hortons counter and around a police cruiser in homage to Korean rapper Psy. Copycat videos emerged from McMaster to Carleton to the Royal Military College.

7. Haven’t Met You Yet, University of Victoria, 320,000 views.*
Almost 1,000 students at the University of Victoria got together and impersonated British Columbia warbler Michael Bublé. Spider-Man, Rick Astley and Billy Mays make appearances.

8. Save a Life, Be a Man Nurse, Laurentian University, 184,000 views.
First-year male nursing students in cowboy hats and scrubs remade Big & Rich’s Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy), replacing the “ride a cowboy” line with “be a man nurse.” They kept the references to “girls who are so pretty.”

9.Rebellion (Lies), University of Guelph, 78,000 views.
Students took over the engineering building for a rather literal interpretation of this Arcade Fire song, with its “every time I close my eyes” refrain. The video includes plenty of pyjamas and one big pillow fight.

10. California Gurls, Dalhousie University, 70,000 views.
The Halifax school got a makeover as the Golden Coast. The lipdub includes multiple Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg impersonators, a merman and fire juggling.

*This post has been updated because the original version incorrectly included a video from U.Vic. in Spain instead of U.Vic. in British Columbia, Canada. The author regrets this error.

Canada’s northern universities have arrived

The library at Nipissing. By Cole Garside.

From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.

It’s the time of year when twelfth graders realize that they need to choose a university—and soon. Let the road trips begin.

But if their travels take them to the libraries at the University of Calgary or Guelph, they may stumble over students sitting on the floors. Study space is in short supply.

If they tour residences at Dalhousie or McGill University, they may find themselves in a converted hotel or see bunks stacked in former study spaces. Each school has had room shortages in recent years.

Continue reading Small schools. Big advantages.

Three killed in crash

Three Laurentian University students died and a fourth was sent to hospital after a collision on a cold Highway 17 near Hagar, Ont. on Tuesday, reports CBC News. Renfrew, Ont. teenagers Keegan Melville, Zabrina Rekowski and Hillary Afelskie died when their Ford minivan collided head on with a Jeep carrying two senior citizens. One passenger, Emily Olmstead, is in hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Police are investigating but they say weather likely wasn’t a factor.

Pledges millions for new campus

The City of Barrie approved a preliminary motion Monday to ask Ontario’s government for the province’s next university campus, reports the Barrie Examiner. City council will also commit $14-million toward a new campus of Laurentian University that would cost roughly $60-million to build. Laurentian itself has committed $14-million. The proposed campus would house 3,000 students and open in 2020. Barrie is estimated to have grown by one-third in the past decade to 135,000 people according to the City, with 191,000 in the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) in 2010, according to Statistics Canada. That makes it the biggest CMA in Ontario, by far, without a university. The Ontario Liberals promised three new campuses during the October election campaign. Ontario will need to add between 50,000 and 104,000 new undergraduates seats by 2025 to meet the growing demand for degrees, according to the new book Academic Reform.

Men are attracted to obstetrics, so why not midwifery?

When Otis Kryzanauskas was four years old, he didn’t want to be an astronaut, a police officer or a firefighter.

After witnessing his younger brother’s birth at home — and cutting the cord — he decided he would one day be a midwife.

Next spring, he’ll be the first male graduate of the Bachelor of Midwifery program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

Kryzanauskas, who has participated in almost 100 births already, believes that he may be the first male midwife to graduate anywhere in Canada — ever.

Why are there so few men in this fast-growing field?

Midwives provide primary care to women and their babies during pregnancy, labour, birth and the postpartum period. According to the Canadian Women’s Health Network, midwives spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes more per appointment with their patients than other medical professionals do. That could explain why demand for midwifery services is increasing. Rare two decades ago, over the course of 2010, there were 14,000 midwife-attended births in Canada.

Continue reading Meet McMaster’s first male midwife

Learning at these three schools happens outside the lecture hall

Concordia University

Like Rodney Dangerfield and rolling in the mud, Concordia University has a tendency to be underappreciated. Long considered the red-headed stepchild of Montreal’s two English universities, it is often lost in the ivy-tinged shadow of McGill. Many wear their alma mater’s scruffier-than-thou reputation on their sleeve. “Concordia is to McGill what the United Church is to Catholicism,” says one-time contemporary dance major Amy Blackmore. Still, the university has consistently found itself on the wrong end of Maclean’s rankings.

But while the numbers may show the 30,000-student university has certain challenges, they obscure many of the innovative aspects of a Concordia education that attract people like Amy Blackmore. Case in point: the faculty of fine arts, based in the glass-and-steel confines of the university’s new Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex. By design, the roughly 3,700 fine arts students live and work in one of Montreal’s busiest strips—from which students and faculty alike draw inspiration. “There’s no sense of there being an ivory tower here,” says Chris Salter, a computer design professor. “There are no closed-off spaces. There’s more of what I’d call seepage.”

“Seepage” is an odd yet apt description of the department’s philosophy. Students who choose fine arts won’t simply learn their chosen craft; more often than not, they’ll learn how to put it to use once they graduate. The department of design and computation arts doesn’t simply teach the esoteric aspects of the craft, but the practical as well. “In any given week I’ll be teaching the academic, such as media theory, to the hard-core technical, like digital audio design,” says Salter. The department offers a double major in computer science and computation arts, the only one of its kind in North America.

If there is a technological pièce de résistance in the department, it’s the Hexagram Institute. Established in 2001, it is the conglomeration of 16 so-called “new media labs” devoted solely to what the university calls “new processes, creative communities and innovative works or prototypes.” Translation: students get to dream up and make really, really cool stuff.

D. Andrew Stewart, a Concordia graduate, is using Matralab (one of the Hexagram’s spaces) to hone the T-Stick, a length of plumbing tube stuffed with electronics and layered with a touch-sensitive surface. The tube reacts to movement and touch, and when hooked up to a computer it can be manipulated to make custom sounds (a flute, maybe, or a sample of Stewart yelling something quasi-obscene). “It’s all open source,” Stewart says, “meaning you could build one yourself with instructions from the Internet. The gyroscope in it is from a Nintendo Wii controller.”

Matralab director Sandeep Bhagwati, who is also one of nine Canada Research Chairs in fine arts, says Stewart’s T-Stick is typical of the department’s beyond-the-box, interdisciplinary approach to art and performance. Indeed, it’s what attracted him to Concordia. “I have a very structured background as an orchestra director and composition professor,” Bhagwati says. “I really don’t like the divides. I needed input from people who were not musicians.”

Music therapy is another example of the department’s mix of theory and practicality. Music majors typically had three choices once they graduate: teaching, performing or gut-wrenching unemployment. You might say that Concordia’s music therapy program is a welcome fourth option. One of only two master’s-level programs in the country, music therapy students spend three days a week during the 12-month period (a total of 1,200 hours) working at various prenatal, health and palliative care centres, as well as women’s shelters and special education facilities around Montreal.

For professor P. K. Langshaw, interaction with the community at large goes both ways. In 2001, Langshaw began an ad hoc outreach program between her students and those of Dans La Rue, a resource centre for street kids featuring an alternative school. The reason: Langshaw, whose many specialties include computer art design, wanted to demystify the subject for DLR students. Her instinct has legs: today, DLR students can take classes at Concordia, earning the equivalent of six credits for producing university-level works. “For a lot of DLR kids, digital self-expression isn’t something that’s necessarily in their realm,” Langshaw says. “But here they are treated the same as any Concordia student.” It’s a fitting partnership: Concordia itself is dans la rue—and proud to be far away from the ivory towers of certain other universities.

- Martin Patriquin

But province is right to stick to their funding formula

The Sault Star editorial Tuesday says that Laurentian University is losing $1 million a year in provincial funding for graduate students due to the distribution of those students not fitting a provincial funding formula.

LU was funded to admit 25 new PhD students and 95 new master’s students starting this, 2007/08, year. Instead, LU admitted 55 new PhD students and only 35 new master’s students. LU requested the province allow them to switch funding intended for new master’s students to instead fund the 30 PhD students.

The province said no, the formula is the formula.

The Sault Star says this is a problem and the formula needs to change.

I disagree.

While I normally would not support a rigid funding formula, the circumstances of this year lead me to.

The spring of 2007 saw the “double cohort” graduate from four-year degree programs. This increased demand for graduate programs and recruited an increase in Master’s program spaces. The province increased the funding of master’s programs to respond to this demand. The reality is that the funding has a policy purpose.

The purpose was to create the new of graduate study spaces available for students completing their undergraduate degrees last year. The province cannot provide money to achieve a set purpose and then allow universities to change that purpose. It does not matter how similar that purpose may seem. To allow LU to divert funds intended for “double cohort” graduate students to other, in this case PhD, students would be to allow universities to ignore public policy direction at will.

Let’s be clear, I don’t believe LU went out and acted in bad faith. To the contrary, I believe they admitted each qualified master’s applicant they had. They then decided to admit more PhD students in the hope that the funding would come anyway. They took a chance, one which didn’t work for them.

I’ve emailed the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities for comment and will update when I receive a reply.