Over the Edge - February 29 features 5 UNBC TOURISM WINS AT PROVINCE WIDE CONTEST Five Students take home awards for social or environmental stewardship projects HANNA PETERSEN NEWS EDITOR ive UNBC tourism students HF have taken home awards at the Project Change competition in Vancouver. This was the first year for the province wide Project Change competition in which students form post-secondary tourism programs were asked to create and develop a social or environmental stewardship project for their community. UNBC students took home awards in three of the nine categories. The winning round-up includes Dawn Hanson, Natasha Wibrink, and Thomas Baumann who won the “Best Conservation Prize” includ- ing $2000 in prize money for their project “UNBC Waste Management Audit.” The Waste Management Aud- it involved the three students auditing the waste of students living in UNBC residences. “For the waste audit, we gathered 79 volunteers living in UN- Project Change BC’s student residences and collected and analyzed their garbadge, seperat- ing it into waste, recyclable, and com- postable items,” says Hansen, a third year Outdoor Recreation and Tourism Management student from White- horse, YK. “Nearly half of it was compostable; very little was actually waste.” The group has also presented their findings to the Prince George Public Interest Research Group. Carmen Marer and former UNBC student Yvette Ekman took home the Best in Region Award and the Com- munity Development Award for their “Winter Coat and Lunch at St. Vincent de Paul” project. The “Winter Coat and Lunch at St. Vincent de Paul” pro- ject aimed at encouraging volunteer- ism among UNBC students and youth in Prince George. The group put on a winter jacket drive on UNBC’s cam- pus and collected more than 40 coats for the homeless. They also hosted a hot dog lunch at St. Vincent de Paul, which gathered donation money for the society. “We learned how many homeless people there are in Prince George, and what they need,” says Marer. “I think more students need to volunteer. Many are willing to donate money, but they often aren’t willing to donate their time.” Jody Phibbs and former student Stephanie Tandy won the Community Development Award for their project called “Community Connect.” Phibbs and Tandy’s project focused on meth- ds of community improvement through acts of kindness. Participants in the project hung posters with sug- gestions for positive actions they can do around campus and throughout the community. They also created a Facebook page where participants were encouraged to share their acts of kindness and inspire others to do the same. “We spread the word through the posters and connections on Face- book,” says Phibbs. “I learned how important networking and having the right connections is to affecting posi- tive change.” The students were introduced to the contest by their ORTM professor Phil Mullins, who gave the students in his 200 level ORTM course the op- tion of submitting to the contest as a part of the project component of the class. All but one group in the class chose to participate. The award cere- mony was held on February 2nd in Vancouver. Project Change was made possible through LinkBC: the tourism education network. Project Change received submissions from seven universities and colleges across the province. 2} Maclean’s Magazine Praises Advantaged of Small Universities UNBC is among the Canadian universities leading the way HANNA PETERSEN NEWS EDITOR wrote ecently Maclean’s an article entitled chools. Big Advantages: “Small Canada’s northern universities have arrived.” The article chronicles the decisions that graduating high school students must make when choos- ing the right school and the daunting feeling that comes with the possibil- ity of taking a class alongside 900 other students. Most UNBC students, of course, would be unfamiliar with that feeling when some upper div- ision courses and even some first year classes at UNBC have only twenty or less students. Apparently, overcrowd- ing has become a very big issue at many older Universities in Canada as the percentage of students wanting to attend university has risen 50 percent in the past fifteen years. It’s a different story in the north. The article details the spaciousness of the northern campus’s at Nipis- sing University in North Bay Ontario, Laurentian University in Sudbury Ontario and our own UNBC. “It’s not that Canada’s small northern cam- puses haven’t grown too,” writes Josh Dehaas. “The difference is these cam- puses were so small they had plenty of room to grow. A decade ago, they couldn’t afford some basic amenities. But as the big southern schools show their age, Canada’s northern schools have arrived.” Once‘a smaller school is big enough to receive more per student funding, it has the ability to “leap-frog” over other institutions. Ontario’s Nipis- sing, for example, has a $25 million dollar library, a new sports facility, and double the amount of lab space it started with ten years ago. This is also partly because philanthropists are more interested in donating to univer- sities where their money will make a big difference. Nippissing received a $15 million dollar donation in 2010. Ten or 15 million dollars donated to a small schools makes for a much larger Mclean’s Ranking impact than the same amount donated to a bigger school. Dehaas points to UNBC’s Eng- lish Professor Kevin Hutchings as an example of smaller universities attracting quality staff. “New facili- ties, in turn, attract new researchers, like Kevin Hutchings, the $500,000 Canada Research Chair in literature, culture, and environmental studies at UNBC,” writes Dehaas. “When he was offered the job in 2000, he was taken by the physical beauty of the then-six-year-old campus. His peers at McMaster and Western warned MACLEAN’S RANKS UNBC AMONG 21 SMALL UNIVERSITIES if CANADA him against working at an unproven institution. But now, 18 years after its founding, UNBC is proven: its No. 1 in total research dollars among pri- marily undergraduate schools in the 2011 Maclean’s rankings.” As the advantages of smaller undergraduate universities become more widespread, UNBC seems to be among the leaders of this new era of successful small universities.