From Laurel’s Desk – March 2018 | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

in the March 2018 issue

Welcome to March!

We are at the midpoint of the semester already, with the first official day of spring just around the corner. Faculty, staff, and students are working hard to push to the end of the semester and, at the institutional level, we are working through a number of big initiatives under tight timelines. Last week David announced Seneca 2020, including a number of program and school moves aligned with the opening of Magna Hall at King this summer and the Centre for Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (CITE) at Newnham in 2019. Some of you may question the reasoning behind some of the decisions. From an academic perspective, one goal was to consolidate our Information and Communications Technology (ICT) programs on the same site as the rest of the technology portfolio and co-locate them with our business programs. We hear from employers that the addition of business courses or content, including entrepreneurship skills, is important for our graduates. The move of ICT to Newnham enables more cross-School and cross-Faculty collaboration, including new program development and deeper engagement with industry partners, such as applied research. This is critical for us to realize the vision for CITE and provide our students with the knowledge and skills they need. As well, for those of you who have been around for some time, you might remember that many years ago the School of Computer Studies was located at a small campus on Don Mills Road. Enrolment and programming grew and the school was split into two units in 1999: one remained at Don Mills and the other moved to Seneca@York (S@Y). In 2003, we were able to reunite the school at S@Y. It has been back together for well over a decade and so we were very reluctant to separate it again.

We also needed to address the space pressures at S@Y and provide some opportunity for growth of existing (where applications are strong) and new programs. Moving the vast majority of our School of Marketing programs to S@Y will enable better collaboration with the School of Media, allow us to re-establish our joint Creative Advertising program with York, and provide better access to downtown Toronto, a hub for marketing and creative industries. The move of the School of Legal and Public Administration and the School of Office Administration to S@Y may seem an outlier. There is no doubt that we needed to consider “what would fit,”, as well as the need for specialized facilities; however, we also looked at enrolment trends, including where enrolment could be stronger and which programs might benefit from the S@Y location and where we might be able to create more opportunities to work with York.

While there were many possibilities and much consideration of those possibilities, our plan is grounded in what we believe are the key opportunities for our future programming and fiscal reality. We have, for most programs, well over a year to plan and prepare. Just like the present semester, the time will fly by and before we know it, many of us will be in a new “home” ready to greet yet another group of students who are full of dreams and expectations. While we may be experiencing change at a great pace, some things, like the feeling of a fresh start, never change.

Laurel

Photo credit: Jordann Rae, second semester student in the Independent Digital Photography Program

View the March 2018 issue of the Academic Newsletter.