UPEI is partnering with the Canada Games Host Society during the 2023 Canada Winter Games from February 18 to March 5. From scorekeepers and ushers to drivers and bloggers, it will take thousands of people working together to plan and support all the athletic and cultural events during the Games. UPEI has developed Guidelines for Volunteer Leave for the 2023 Canada Winter Games. UPEI employees who wish to volunteer are eligible to apply for up to 15 hours of paid time off to volunteer for the Games.

To learn more and apply to be a volunteer, visit the 2023 Canada Winter Games Volunteer Portal.
 

The 2SLGBTQ+ Support Group Facilitators invite all 2SLGBTQ+ and those over the age of 17 to the Fox and Crow on Wednesday, April 6, at 7:30 pm, for a casual discussion on self-compassion followed by exciting Wednesday Night Trivia. Hosts will provide free nachos for the group! Please reserve your spot (or spots!) by emailing us at upei.lgbt.group@gmail.com or signing up online at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GXPWT6P. Thank you all for your support and participation.

The deadline for Summer 2022 Tuition Waivers is April 29, 2022. We encourage you to have tuition waivers submitted as soon as possible to assist in the timely processing. Tuition Waiver forms must be submitted electronically.   

Online Employee and Spouse/Dependent Tuition Waiver fillable forms can be found on the main page of MyUPEI under UPEI Forms. 

If you have any questions, please contact Human Resources at: (902) 566- 0514 or hrgeneral@upei.ca. 

Ramadan Mubarak!

Ramadan Mubarak to all! May this month be generous with blessings, love, and peace to you and your loved ones.

Some reminders about Ramadan:

- Ramadan is a holy month of fasting practiced by Muslims all around the world. It will end approximately on Sunday, May 1, and goes by the lunar calendar.

- Fasting means no food or water, not even chewing gum. Fasting is done from dawn until dusk. Students may be up until midnight for prayers and up again to eat before dawn. In PEI, this translates to roughly 16 hours. Those studying abroad could be fasting for up to 21 hours.

- Not all Muslims may be fasting and may participate in the religion in various and different ways. There are many reasons for this, and it doesn’t dictate a person’s religiosity.

- There are many resources available online, should you like to learn more.

Muslim students, faculty, and staff may be hungry, dehydrated, and tired during the afternoon and towards the end of the day. Due to the pandemic and limitations on gatherings, this may feel lonelier for those practicing. It is commonly a very social time where communal gatherings are held to break the fast, eat together, and pray. 

We thank you all for creating a caring and supportive environment for our Muslim community on campus this Ramadan and every day.

The Faculty of Science Graduate Studies Committee invites the campus community to the next Environmental Sciences & Human Biology seminar on Friday, April 1, 2022, at 12:30 pm.

Jenna Cahill, MSc candidate in Environmental Sciences, will present "Assessing the impacts of off-bottom oyster aquaculture on coastal birds" and Junshi Dong, MSc candidate in Environmental Sciences, will present "Reconstructing the spatial dispersal and the cross-species transmission of bat coronavirus." The meeting will be held via Google Meet: meet.google.com/svu-ouxd-fmx. All are welcome.

Dr. Joshua Wyman, candidate for the tenure-track position with the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts, will give two public presentations.

The first, entitled "Forensic and investigative interviewing with children, youth, older adults, and people with developmental disabilities," will take place on Thursday, April 7, 2022, at 1:00 pm in Memorial Hall, Room 308.

The second, a teaching demonstration entitled "Psychoeducational assessment and intervention practices for children and youth diagnosed with an intellectual disability," will be held on Friday, April, 8, 2022, at 9:45 am in Memorial Hall, Room 308.

All are welcome to attend.

The Scholarships and Awards Office is accepting applications for Convocation scholarships and awards! The application deadline for the following awards is Friday, April 1, 2022.

Click the links provided to access the application and/or recommendation forms for more information. Please submit your application(s) and any supporting documents electronically to scholarships@upei.ca or in person to the Scholarships and Awards Office at 202 Dalton Hall.

    Arlie Parks Scholarship - In Memory of Dr. Kenneth MacIntyre (Science)

    Marylou Hughes Scholarship (Science)

    Gerald M. Gerry Birt Memorial Award (Science/Nursing/Arts)

    David Austin O'Malley-Keyes Memorial Award (Arts/Music)

    Frank J. Costello Scholarship (Arts/Education)

    Hon. Justice Mark R. MacGuigan Memorial Scholarship (Arts/Law)

    Joseph A. Ghiz Memorial Scholarship (Law)

    PEI's Famous Five Graduating Student Award (Arts/Campus Community)

    Dr. Graeme and Alberta Bryant Boswall Award (Campus Community)

    Dr. Regis Duffy Academic Achievement Award (Campus Community)

    UPEI Class of 1989 Award (Campus Community)

The Robertson Library’s OER Development Program is accepting grant applications for the creation or adaptation of open educational resources (OERs). The grant types include:

• Open Textbook Grant: up to $6000

  • the development of a new open textbook on a topic that is currently not covered by an existing open textbook 

• Open Textbook Adaptation Grant: up to $4,000

  • the adaptation of one or more open textbooks to create a new version or edition of an open textbook (i.e., a Canadian edition of an existing open textbook)

• Supplementary Resources Grant: up to $2,000

  • the creation of ancillary materials for existing open textbooks, including but not limited to test banks, slide decks, or interactive media, etc.

Applications that support first-year courses will be given priority as they reach the most amount of students, but all applications will be reviewed and considered. The deadline for applications has been extended to Friday, April 29, 2022, with work expected to begin during the spring or summer. More information is available at https://library.upei.ca/OERProgram/grants.

Questions about your grant idea? Contact Kim Mears.

The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community – students, faculty and staff – to attend a virtual lecture (teaching demonstration) by Rick Adams, candidate for a three-year term as an assistant professor or lecturer of accounting position. 

Candidate Bio:

Rick attended UPEI, and holds a Master’s in Business Administration (health care administration and organization development) from Northcentral University, Arizona. He is a certified professional accountant. Having practiced as a chartered accountant for several years, Rick began teaching as a sessional lecturer at UPEI, and eventually left public accounting to begin his career within the PEI health system.

During a very successful health care career, Rick served as chief executive officer of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown for almost six years, and was instrumental in leading major hospital expansions including Ambulatory Care, the Emergency Department, and the Cancer Treatment Centre. Other executive positions held within the health system include executive director of PEI Hospitals and Mental Health Services for Queens and Kings County, executive director of Corporate Services for Health PEI, and executive director of Quality and Risk Management for Health PEI.

Currently serving in a nine-month term position within the Faculty of Business, UPEI, Rick has served in a similar capacity as assistant professor of accounting from August through May each year, from 2019 through 2022. Rick’s passion for teaching is very evident in that during his entire health care career, he served as a sessional lecturer at UPEI for almost 30 years.

Rick enjoys working and serving as treasurer for a local hockey association of more than 600 members. Other interests include fishing, cycling, guitar, and piano. He resides in Cornwall, PEI, with his wife Trenna, and Maggie, their new puppy.

The lecture will take place on Friday, April 1, from 9--9:45 am (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/63480703421?pwd=Y1Y3WWx2UGhVdEpFcFkrU0p3WGExZz09

Meeting ID: 634 8070 3421
Passcode: 788992

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.

The Scholarships and Awards Office is accepting applications for the UPEI Student Adversity Awards. Eligible students are encouraged to review the award criteria online and submit an application through the Scholarships and Award Application portal, which can also be found listed in the UPEI Forms section on MyUPEI. The application deadline is Thursday, March 31, 2022.

If you have questions about the application process or award criteria, please contact scholarships@upei.ca or visit us in Dalton Hall, Room 202.

The UPEI E-Learning Office and the Teaching and Learning Centre are hosting UPEI's fifth Teaching Community Conference online on Tuesday, May 3, 2022. This year's theme is "Moving Forward."

The call for proposals on presentations about your teaching or how you support teaching at UPEI is now open with a deadline of Thursday, April 14. Please review our submission form for more information. 

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/acenet-introduction-to-natural-language-processing-tickets-264349194557

Join ACENET for a brief introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP).

About this event

How do computers understand language? It seems impossible that zeroes and ones could ever add up to words that humans can understand, but machine language has come a long way in the past few years. Let us take you behind the code to explain how machines simulate language comprehension, and why it’s a far more complicated problem than “bonjour = hello”. This talk is aimed at an audience that is not necessarily familiar with computers or language comprehension but would like a primer to the field and what it can realistically do. We will explain natural language processing from the perspective of machines that cannot understand words but capture semantic meaning by processing data.

This session will take place on Thursday, April 6, 12:00 pm--3:00 pm (Atlantic time)

You will need to have a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) on which you have administrative privileges, as you will need to pre-load specific software packages. 

Participants must register using their institutional/organizational email address (not a personal email, i.e., gmail)

Instructions about how to join will be sent out one day prior to the start of the event.

The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community--students, faculty and staff--to attend a virtual research presentation by Steve Granger for a tenure-track assistant professor of management position with a focus on human resource management (HRM). 

Candidate's Bio:

Steve Granger is a PhD candidate in organizational behaviour and human resources at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He conducts research from a psychological perspective in the core areas of occupational health, gig work, and individual differences. His work has been published in various outlets, including the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Relations, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Safety Research, and Organizational Dynamics. He has also taught multiple courses in organizational behaviour and serves as an editorial board member for Human Relations.

Presentation Title: The Impact of COVID-19 on Professional Gig Workers: Identifying Challenges and Psychosocial Resources for Resilience

Abstract:

Scholarship on stress and resilience at work has repeatedly overlooked professional gig workers despite the rapid growth of this independent workforce. Studying such workers, especially under conditions of global disruption, offers an opportunity to expand theory on the role of personal resources in promoting resilience and well-being in the absence of contextual resources traditionally offered by organizations. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and using unique qualitative and quantitative data gathered prior to and during the COVID-19 global pandemic, we investigate the pandemic’s impact on an international sample of professional gig workers and test the relationship between psychosocial resources and workers’ resilience. Results suggest that workers experienced the pandemic as an environmental jolt (Meyer, 1982), which affected their working lives through shrinking gig work availability, and greater challenges with fluctuating emotions, organizing day-to-day work, and maintaining relationships. Further, we examined the role that pre-pandemic levels of two theoretically informed personal resources—work meaningfulness and the emotional carrying capacity of these workers’ networks—and find that work meaningfulness is associated with cognitive and affective well-being, and emotional carrying capacity is associated with social and affective well-being, as well as psychological resilience. Taken together, this research provides novel insights into professional gig workers’ resilience and well-being during the pandemic and contributes to our understanding of gig workers’ experiences of environmental jolts.

The presentation will take place on April 1, 2:00--3:00 pm (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/68210211032?pwd=ZjIwelE4UE04dmlZck81WWJ4TXY0UT09

Meeting ID: 682 1021 1032

Passcode: 070531

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.

The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community--students, faculty, and staff--to attend a virtual lecture (teaching demonstration) by Steve Granger for a tenure-track assistant professor of management position with a focus on human resource management (HRM). 

Candidate's Bio:

Steve Granger is a PhD candidate in organizational behaviour and human resources at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He conducts research from a psychological perspective in the core areas of occupational health, gig work, and individual differences. His work has been published in various outlets, including the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Relations, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Safety Research, and Organizational Dynamics. He has also taught multiple courses in Organizational Behaviour and serves as an editorial board member for Human Relations.

Lecture Title: The Next Best Safety Dollar: Using Evidence to Decide How to Invest in Workplace Safety

The lecture will take place on April 1, 10-10:45 am (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/68600200264?pwd=L2FSZ2l0anJmdzh1MFJzUzBvSks3Zz09

Meeting ID: 686 0020 0264

Passcode: 570029

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.

On Wednesday, March 30, between 10 pm and midnight, ITSS will conduct routine maintenance on the Remote Desktop Services accessed via the website myDesktop.upei.ca. During this time, any remote desktops or applications accessed via this site will be unavailable. RX Works will be unavailable between 11 pm and midnight only. If you have any questions, please contact the ITSS Help Desk at 902-566-0465.

This week's Tea(ching) Break is a webpage from Brock University's Centre for Pedagogical Innovation on the Role of Reflection. If you are asking your students to reflect on their learning, you may find a framework or prompt among the various reflection resources on this page to support them.  

The Faculty of Science Graduate Studies Committee invites the campus community to the next Environmental Sciences & Human Biology seminar on Friday, April 1, 2022, at 12:30 pm.

Jenna Cahill, MSc candidate in Environmental Sciences, will present "Assessing the impacts of off-bottom oyster aquaculture on coastal birds" and Junshi Dong, MSc candidate in Environmental Sciences, will present "Reconstructing the spatial dispersal and the cross-species transmission of bat coronavirus." The meeting will be held via Google Meet: meet.google.com/svu-ouxd-fmx. All are welcome.

Dr. Amy Taylor, candidate for the tenure track position with the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts, will give two public presentations.

The first, entitled "Successful Identity Transition After a Developmental Crisis: Lessons from a Case Study of a Man with Physiological Impotence," will take place on Thursday, March 31, 2022, at 1:00 pm via ZOOM at https://upei.zoom.us/j/62529761076?pwd=NlhFT2ZjbUNiYWIwb3dUSnFOQ3JTUT09.

The second, a teaching demonstration entitled "Therapist as assessment instrument: A phenomenological and psychodynamic approach to formulation," will be held on Friday, April 1, 2022, at 10:15 am via ZOOM at https://upei.zoom.us/j/68129422646?pwd=eVNkaHA3S093K01oZU5KdmJUTVk2QT09

All are welcome to attend.

The Scholarships and Awards Office is accepting applications for Convocation scholarships and awards! The application deadline for the following awards is Friday, April 1, 2022.

Click the links provided to access the application and/or recommendation forms for more information. Please submit your application(s) and any supporting documents electronically to scholarships@upei.ca or in person to the Scholarships and Awards Office at 202 Dalton Hall.

    Arlie Parks Scholarship - In Memory of Dr. Kenneth MacIntyre (Science)

    Marylou Hughes Scholarship (Science)

    Gerald M. Gerry Birt Memorial Award (Science/Nursing/Arts)

    David Austin O'Malley-Keyes Memorial Award (Arts/Music)

    Frank J. Costello Scholarship (Arts/Education)

    Hon. Justice Mark R. MacGuigan Memorial Scholarship (Arts/Law)

    Joseph A. Ghiz Memorial Scholarship (Law)

    PEI's Famous Five Graduating Student Award (Arts/Campus Community)

    Dr. Graeme and Alberta Bryant Boswall Award (Campus Community)

    Dr. Regis Duffy Academic Achievement Award (Campus Community)

    UPEI Class of 1989 Award (Campus Community)

The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community--students, faculty and staff--to attend a virtual research presentation by Steve Granger for a tenure-track assistant professor of management position with a focus on human resource management (HRM). 

Candidate's Bio:

Steve Granger is a PhD candidate in organizational behaviour and human resources at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He conducts research from a psychological perspective in the core areas of occupational health, gig work, and individual differences. His work has been published in various outlets, including the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Relations, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Safety Research, and Organizational Dynamics. He has also taught multiple courses in organizational behaviour and serves as an editorial board member for Human Relations.

Presentation Title: The Impact of COVID-19 on Professional Gig Workers: Identifying Challenges and Psychosocial Resources for Resilience

Abstract:

Scholarship on stress and resilience at work has repeatedly overlooked professional gig workers despite the rapid growth of this independent workforce. Studying such workers, especially under conditions of global disruption, offers an opportunity to expand theory on the role of personal resources in promoting resilience and well-being in the absence of contextual resources traditionally offered by organizations. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and using unique qualitative and quantitative data gathered prior to and during the COVID-19 global pandemic, we investigate the pandemic’s impact on an international sample of professional gig workers and test the relationship between psychosocial resources and workers’ resilience. Results suggest that workers experienced the pandemic as an environmental jolt (Meyer, 1982), which affected their working lives through shrinking gig work availability, and greater challenges with fluctuating emotions, organizing day-to-day work, and maintaining relationships. Further, we examined the role that pre-pandemic levels of two theoretically informed personal resources—work meaningfulness and the emotional carrying capacity of these workers’ networks—and find that work meaningfulness is associated with cognitive and affective well-being, and emotional carrying capacity is associated with social and affective well-being, as well as psychological resilience. Taken together, this research provides novel insights into professional gig workers’ resilience and well-being during the pandemic and contributes to our understanding of gig workers’ experiences of environmental jolts.

The presentation will take place on April 1, 2:00--3:00 pm (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/68210211032?pwd=ZjIwelE4UE04dmlZck81WWJ4TXY0UT09

Meeting ID: 682 1021 1032

Passcode: 070531

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.