The Voice Magazine welcomes our new overlords!

Or to be more specific, a welcome to our new president, Dr. Peter Scott.  Hailing from Australia, where he worked as the “Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) at the University of Technology Sydney”.  His education was from the University of Sheffield in the UK in cognitive science and psychology. and he has a focus in digital educational technology.

The press release goes into some more detail about him at: https://news.athabascau.ca/faculty/10th-president/ and if you want to hear him speak, you can skip to his portion of the video at https://youtu.be/XpVw5SrYAlw?t=378.  It may be worth doing so just to hear his accent—a prototypical educated British accent, that should certainly serve AU well when he presents in most places, and could be part of why he’s been able to pull in over 80 million dollars in international grants over his career—something which I’m sure was the primary concern of the UCP appointed Board of Governors.

Unfortunately, from that first video, it’s hard to get a read yet as to whether he fits the mold of people who think university is simply a glorified job-training school or a real place of education.  However, there are promising signs in that he is the first in his family to achieve a degree, that it was a humanities degree, and that he has not only continued to move forward in the academic system but has spent it trying to improve access to higher education for students.

It will be interesting to see how he navigates the transition from the very urbanized Sydney, Australia to small town Alberta, especially during the current UCP tenure as they put forward their Alberta 2030 strategy that some academics have harshly criticized as being too focussed on immediate job training as opposed to preparing Albertans for a future labour market and society.

Meanwhile, this week in the Voice, we bring back the “Course Exam” but with a bit of a twist.  Since many students eventually plan to seek out an even higher credential, we thought it might be worthwhile to start reviewing some of the graduate courses, so you can start your planning early.

Also this week, Xine Xu returns with a look at how she’s handled her first month on the Keto diet, noting some of the challenges and rewards she’s found along the way.

And Jessica Young has managed to find some music that she likes.  If you’ve read some of her music reviews, you know that this isn’t a common thing, so it stood out for me that she did.  She also recommends it as good background music for studying, so you may want to check out her music review of “Post-Spirit 1974-1978”

Of course we also have recipes, advice, events, scholarships, some thougthful articles and more this issue.  The Fly on the Wall this week has some particularly good advice that all students should follow—advice that I rarely did, and suffered more for it.  But even with all that stuff, I think we could use some more around here, so if you’re interested in earning a bit of side money and think you can write something students would be intersted in, why not get in touch?

Enjoy the read!