In this issue of the Iron Warrior I would like to once again take a few minutes to update you about the recent progress of the PDEng Renewal Task Force. As many of you know and have received e-mails about, the Task Force has released the first set of recommendations for renewal of PDEng on Friday, February 12, 2010. The recommendations focused on some of the short-term changes to the program as well as the long-term changes regarding the overall structure of the program and its fundamental assumptions. Since then, the Task Force has asked for your feedback and has also gathered feedback from the Dean, faculty administration and professors, PDEng staff, PDEng mentors, alumni mentors (who are in some cases employers of Waterloo co-op students) and finally co-op staff. In general all of the recommendations were fairly welcomed and a lot of great suggestions as well as further questions were received in the feedback. Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to read the recommendations and to provide the valuable feedback – over 200 pages of comments were received and all will or have already been taken into consideration. If you haven’t had a chance to read the recommendations and/or comment on them – they are still available for viewing on the Task Force’s website: http://www.engineering.uwaterloo.ca/pdengrenewal. Please feel free to share your comments, questions and concerns in the general feedback area. Moving right ahead, this week on the website you will be able to see some of the statistics from the feedback received as well as updates on some of the short term recommendations and their implementation. I encourage you to visit the website this week and review the new updates. A number of the short-term recommendations will be implemented in time for the spring 2010 term. During the last couple of weeks, the Task Force has been busy looking into some of the specifics of renewed PDEng such as workload, flexibility in completion of assignments and marking scheme as well as some more short-term recommendations. Also, last week the Dean of Engineering, Dr. Adel Sedra, attended the Task Force meeting and provided some great information about budgeting and resources involved in PDEng. Dean Sedra is happy to share some of those announcements this week at the EngSoc meeting as well as in further communication opportunities with the students.
Soon the Task Force will also look into issues such as marking scheme for the renewed PDEng courses, integration of departments and delivery of the courses. Following that period a new set of recommendations focusing on some of those specifics will be released.
This is all for now, stay tuned for more updates. If you have any questions, concerns and/or suggestions please feel free to reach me or David by e-mail: aavrelin@engmail.uwaterloo.ca or asoc_vpedu@engmail.uwaterloo.ca.
Leave a Reply