Core Area
Education
Strategic Area
Sustained focus on recruitment and services to attract and support an outstanding and diverse student population
Goal Status
In Progress
Objectives
- Continue to enhance student services—working with students to optimize to meet their needs.
- Academic portfolio to support Associate Dean Students (ADS) portfolio efforts to create a cross-program culture of vibrant and connected student communities across the Faculty (2025).
- Associate Dean Students portfolio will continue to increase student engagement efforts and activities across programs to increase awareness of the ADS and its role in supporting students, building connections amongst students, and overall student support (2024).
- Academic and Students portfolio will continue to look for ways to involve the Pharm Sci Embedded Counsellor in providing proactive and supportive programming to students (2024).
- Office of ADGPS to support students through the Student Winter Housing Allocation Program organized by the UBC Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Office; the program aids student recruitment and yield by allowing graduate programs to offer admission to selected applicants with a guaranteed spot for winter housing. EDI considerations will form a component of the selection process for the students (2024).
Achieved Goals
- Hired Indigenous Strategic Initiatives Manager with 0.5 FTE responsibility to provide support to Indigenous students through OSS (May 2023).
- Created Associate Dean Students portfolio to enable the Faculty to better support students (Aug 2023).
- Created Student Engagement Coordinator role (Dec 2023), to better improve Faculty-student relations.
- Increased FTE of Student Counsellor role to 0.6 FTE (Feb 2024).
- With the support of the ADGPS Office, a UBC Pharm Sci Postdoctoral Society established, with a goal to foster a vibrant postdoctoral fellow community through organized social and professional development activities (2023).
- $200,000 USD in funding granted by the McKesson Foundation to Jason Min and Larry Leung to build the first Indigenous Pharmacy Student Collegium in Canada as part of the UPROOT project (2023).
- SPIIF fund approved "Indigenous Student Support" by Larry Leung, Jason Min and Nadine Gerhardt as part of the UPROOT project—awarded $25,000. This project aims to seed, grow, and formalize co-curricular and support structures for cultural safety for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in the Entry-to-Practice PharmD Program through three proposed pillars: 1) Indigenous student space, 2) Indigenous student mentorship program; and 3) land-based cultural learning (April 2024).
- Created new Student Engagement Coordinator position within the Office of Student Services (Nov 2023).
- Increased the Faculty’s portion of our embedded counsellor’s position from 50% to 60% (fall 2023).