/student-centred / Learning to Be ‘Life-Ready’

SFU Urban Studies graduate students Mike Soron and Laura Slater in the field

THE SFU DIFFERENCE We give our students the knowledge they need to succeed academically. But more importantly, we give them the research skills and real-world experience they need to succeed in life.

  • $22-million gift launches Beedie School of Business

    Can you put a price tag on a dynamic and relevant post-secondary education? How about $22 million? That was the record-breaking gift presented by the Burnaby, BC-based father-son team of Keith and Ryan Beedie to establish the Beedie School of Business at SFU. Acknowledging the personal and professional value of his own undergraduate education at SFU, Ryan called the endowment “an investment in the future that will enable the university to attract the best students, teachers and researchers for generations to come.”

  • Looking backwards to build a brighter urban future

    SFU Urban Studies graduate students spent three weeks in England and Wales studying sustainable building techniques at a summer school hosted by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, an educational charity established in 1986 by Prince Charles. The Culture of Building was the first summer school program since SFU began a 2009 partnership with the foundation, which promotes advanced education in sustainable urbanism. Lectures and workshops include drawing and building exercises and field trips to develop students’ knowledge of traditional building and repair techniques, including thatching and dry-stone walling, and how to apply them in the 21st century. The program ended with a weeklong charrette (an intense design workshop) in Wales, where students designed a structure to be built later by the Prince of Wales’ building-crafts apprentices.

  • Making the community the classroom

    When public health is your subject, the community should be your classroom. And so it was for a group of SFU Health Sciences undergraduates who this year benefited from a new service-learning model that aims to blur the line between who is teaching and who is being taught. The bi-weekly program paired SFU students with youngsters from a Port Coquitlam elementary school for a term. The public-health interns gained invaluable hands-on experience while delivering important messages about physical, emotional and mental health in an authentic community setting.

  • New bridging programs for Aboriginal students

    Two preparatory programs for university-bound Aboriginal students secured continuing funding in 2010. The Aboriginal Pre-Health Bridge Program and the Aboriginal Bridge Program are designed to give students a solid foundation of academic and personal success skills to help them prepare for a full range of post-secondary education options. The bridging programs complement SFU’s new Aboriginal Undergraduate Admission Policy, which considers an applicant’s educational history, cultural knowledge, work experience, cultural goals and other achievements in addition to traditional requirements.