Campus showing gains (and growing pains)
As UBCO reaches the end of its major construction, are new buildings working as well as they could?
9/7/11
UBCO's new medical building, complete for the 2011-2012 school year. Photo by Hanss Lujan
The university has met its targets for population and educational increases and will sport 7901 students this year – a huge increase from the mere 2829 in 2005.
This growth became starkly apparent at the two-day, five-ceremony graduation in June. Among the 1174 students in UBCO’s largest-yet group of graduates were two historic milestones: the awarding of the first PhD degree completed completely at the Okanagan campus and the first graduating class in Human Kinetics.
That first Human Kinetics graduating class included grad student Ruth Brown, who was awarded the Governor General‘s Gold Academic Medal. The medal is given each year to the UBCO student with the highest academic standing, and Brown received the honour after completing her Master’s degree in February with a 92% average.
Another significant graduate was UBCO’s first PhD student, microbiologist Max Jones. While others have completed doctoral degrees after transferring here Jones is the first person to complete a PhD entirely at UBC’s Okanagan campus – although his time wasn’t all spent in Kelowna. Jones’s research on diversity among the tropical staple crop breadfruit involved fieldwork and courses in Hawaii, Florida, and Samoa.
“Personally for me it’s a great honour to be the first,” Jones told us, “yet I feel it’s a great responsibility as well. How I do in the future will reflect on the school so I really do feel a sense that I have to do well.
“It had pros and cons,” Jones said about his experience, explaining that while he got to have some say in how things would develop, sometimes the necessary forms wouldn’t be in place or people wouldn’t know how to proceed. An Ontario native, Jones will return to the province to do a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph.
During the graduation ceremony, The Phoenix caught up with UBCO Deputy Vice Chancellor and Principal Doug Owram to talk about the university’s growth and future.
"The first Human Kinetics cohort has come through,” Owram explained, “Last year was the first for engineering so each year we seem to add something new.
“The students, of course, for the last few years have been going through building and living here has been like living on a construction site. [This current stabilization is] what I’d call the transition of the campus from a start-up enterprise to a more stable and mature enterprise going forward.”
Owram characterized the 2011 graduating group as a combination of the recent transitional cohorts and the more stable future grad classes. “The first two or three years were of course students who had started at OUC or had transferred here from other institutions, and these are people who’ve started at UBC and are finishing at UBC,” he said. ”They’ve always been UBC students - that makes a difference in their approach to the program.”
According to just-released preliminary enrolment numbers for winter 2011, the student population is growing more diverse. The number of international students is up to 597, who represent 78 different countries – almost quadruple the number of countries represented in 2005. “What’s happening is every year we’re seeing students coming from further and further afield,” Owram said.
One third of incoming students now hail from outside BC, while within the province, entrants from the Lower Mainland have increased 36% relative to fall 2010. These Lower Mainland applicants make up almost a quarter of UBCO’s total 2049 first-year students.
In time to accommodate the increased population, the university has expanded physically by adding three new buildings. The second- and third-largest faculty enrolment growths by percentage are in Management (up 27% over 2010) and Engineering (up 20%), and the two will join the faculty of Education in the unimaginatively named new $68-million Engineering Management Education building. Meanwhile, the largest grower, Human Kinetics (54% increase over 2010), will transition into the Health Sciences Center along with UBCO’s inaugural 32 Medicine students, who will complete their first semester in Vancouver before coming to the Okanagan.
The HSC project began in 2008 when then-Premier Gordon Campbell announced the establishment of the Southern Medical Program (SMP) and a new medical building that would join UBCO’s $450-million expansion. Now complete but for a few finishing touches, the on-campus Centre will be used primarily for first and second year students (as well as research). The later and more practical aspects of the program will be done at the SMP Clinical Academic Campus, an expansion of Kelowna General Hospital.
The 48,158 square metre HSC features two lecture theatres, with 75 and 135 steats respectively. Using videoconferencing technology, each of the four locations in the UBC Medicine program (Point Grey, Vancouver Island, Prince George, and Kelowna) will share lectures. No matter where a given lecture is physically performed, it will be broadcast to each location’s theater screens, and students can respond via push-to-talk mics.
Videoconference technology is also featured in the PBL (Problem-Based Learning) labs, where students work on hypothetical applied-medicine problems. “They work in groups of eight [and] with real-world cases,” SMP Admissions and Communications Coordinator Warren Brock explained, “they study as a group, they come up with a solution as a group, and then they work with the instructor and present it to the class.”
The actual building sells itself convincingly: the design is clean and precise, with the technology shrewdly integrated. Everything from the structure’s orientation to its mechanics function to conserve energy; everything from the washrooms to the roof is set up to reduce water consumption. The 31-million-dollar facility, with its precisely integrated next-level technology, its myriad innovations, and its slick utilitarianism, is only missing one thing… an entire faculty of Health Science.
While the Human Kinetics faculty will at least partially move in to the HSC, UBCO’s popular Nursing program will remain on the third floor of the Fine Arts building. The School of Nursing (which is now welcoming its largest first-year class ever) seems perfectly suited to being placed with the other health sciences, causing many to wonder why it wasn’t included in the HSC.
“I don’t really have an answer for [why that is],” Brock admitted, “I don’t know. With the spacing issues… and with the curriculum a certain amount of time has to be booked for the lecture theatres, but I can’t speak to how that’s resourced and why [Nursing] wasn’t moved up here.”
According to Acting Director of Nursing Jeanette Virek, the snub was because the new building and the SMP is attached to UBC Vancouver. “[Unlike] our other schools and faculties here, it is run, budgeted, administered, all of those pieces, out from Vancouver,” she said. “The space allocation was not looked at with the placing and [needs] of our campus here; it was the SMP’s building.
“It’s really a shame that we couldn’t have had a way to bring the disciplines together. To have our nursing students there with the Medical students and the Health and Exercise Science students – it just makes sense… but why it never happened I’m not really sure.”
Ironically, the building’s components are seamlessly and thoughtfully integrated, but its presence on campus is exactly the opposite. “A lot of that has been, I think, because it was basically picked up and plunked down,” Vinek said.
In another ironic turn, the same availability requirement that ensures medical students have as much space as they could possibly need is now a barrier to Nursing being able to incorporate into the HSC in the future. That barrier would be understandable if the HSC were an existing facility, but given that the building was constructed from scratch with seemingly every detail in mind, it’s perplexing that it wouldn’t have been constructed with room to accommodate UBCO’s other health science.
“Perhaps the senior executives had some different conversations,” Vinek suggested, “but from Nursing’s perspective there was no input. It would have been good to have those conversations ahead of time. But we’re having them now.
“We are working together [with the SMP] down at the academic center at the hospital [and] once they’re up and running we’ll look at building some more of that foundation... which it would be so much simpler [to do] if we were in the same building.”
It’s worth asking whether new buildings in general are meeting student needs. The $42-million Arts and Sciences II and its predecessor, the $32-million Fipke Centre, have as much or more office space than student areas and classrooms.
Additionally, some newer facilities are experiencing growing pains as certain features fail to work in practice. As a case in point, the UNC student building initially featured two primary entrances: a wall of automatic sliding doors for the summer and a heat-retaining set of the doors for the winter (think a decompression chamber or the quarantine lock from Alien… or, better yet, go over to UNC and look at the doors yourself).
Eagle-eyed returning students will notice that the first set of doors, which were often conspicuously ‘Out Of Order’, have been permanently converted to a glass wall. Consequently, students are now forced to all bottleneck through the two-part doors year-round - admittedly a bit of a #firstworldproblem but nevertheless a clear failing of our new buildings.
“The change to the opening/closing doors in the UNC student centre building is a win-lose situation,” said UBCSUO Financial Coordinator Kirk Chavarie, explaining that while the doors were great in the summer, they caused cold air and snow to be brought into the building throughout the winter months. Chavarie added that though the UNC has lost its main entrance, it has gained wall space that can be used for club, course union, and student union booths.
Ultimately, any crowding in the UNC entrance pales in comparison to students’ biggest source of discontent: the zoo that has been UBCO’s library over the past year-plus. The root of the problem is straightforward: as classrooms and student spaces increase in number to accommodate an expanded student population, common areas like the campus library become overwhelmed.
Due to the lack of available computers and workstations, those visiting the library during peak hours fall into three categories 1) students who have a spot, 2) students pacing laps looking for an open spot and 3) assholes who leave their stuff at a spot so they can come and go as they please.
With Education moving out of the second floor of the library, its offices will be repurposed for the administrative side of the library, which will vacate the first floor The newly available area on the main floor will be converted into more student space as part of a library upgrade. Phase one of that upgrade was completed this summer when crews expanded the technological capacity of the building.
“We were at the point with our previous IT infrastructure where it would have been difficult to expand the number of computers... or even move them [even if we had the physical space],” explained Learning Services Librarian Sarah Stang.
“It’s also understood that [the upgrade] is an interim solution,” Chief Librarian Melody Burton pointed out. “We’ll be actively seeking funds for an addition to the library.” Burton added that in addition to the AVP’s office, Deputy Vice Chancellor Doug Owram has been heavily involved in making the upgrade happen.
The library staff will now begin working with a designer to determine the actual layout of the remodeled main floor. Ideally, the redesign would reduce and balance sound levels and traffic by intermingling ‘soft-seating’ (armchairs, etc.) with workstations and group areas. In the meantime, the library employees will transition into the second floor before any construction begins on the main floor so that library services will not be interrupted. At that point, the library staff will work with the Facilities department as they have done in the past to ensure that construction will not excessively impact student use of the library.
“We don’t have the luxury of being able to close while we’re doing this,” Stang pointed out. With that in mind, students can expect the library to potentially be as busy as last year, at least for the first few months of the year.
“[Students] may want to come when services are not as busy,” Burton advised, “evenings are [better] than daytime between 10 and 3, when it’s very, very busy.” However, with two new buildings and the full opening of Arts and Sciences II, students may finally find the room they’ve been looking for.
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