On March 5, 2021 the eleventh annual Faculty of Communication and Technology (FCAT) undergraduate conference was held online. The conference provides students within the faculty the opportunity to showcase their ideas and interests in a community forum.
With 63 projects and 84 student presenters, this year was the faculty’s largest conference. Keynote presenter Jeff Ward and a panel of four FCAT alumni shared career stories and offered advice to students.
During the panel’s discussion about the alumni’s current jobs, user experience designer and School of Interactive Arts alum Sean Warwick advised students to maintain a connection with colleagues throughout their academic careers. He said the interactive arts field is “a lot smaller of a community once you get out into the world.”
To prepare for jobs out of university, panellists emphasized students should “be creative with getting experience,” whether through attending networking events, collaborating with faculty professors, or offering to help with social media at a current job.
Communication alum and marketing coordinator Tiana Marconato said jobs often look for writing samples. Her recommendation was for students to draft press releases independently or to reach out to local media outlets for publication.
Student attendees asked how selective they should be when looking for jobs. Kathleen Estanislao, digital marketing manager, advised job seekers to connect with existing workers at the job they are applying for to learn about the work environment before accepting an offer.
The four alumni agreed it is important to have some flexibility because “your first job isn’t necessarily going to define your career [but] ultimately, you want to be happy on some level.”
In his presentation, Jeff Ward spoke about his experience as an Indigenous entrepreneur, web designer, and software developer. He discussed the importance of centering values and ethics around work to ensure balance and fulfilment.
Ward currently works with nonprofit organizations, charities, and Indigenous initiatives to focus on “the impact of others through technology.” He helped develop an app called Next 150, which aims to advance reconciliation by educating users about the Indigenous land they are on.
Students asked Ward whether he finds value in career advisors with varying opinions from his own. He told students to look for people with “a diverse range of inputs.” He said it is important for people to balance their surroundings with others who can provide different perspectives, as well as with people who have similar views to maintain core values.
After the speeches, students shared their work. Presentations were split into two blocks, lasting one hour each. There were eight different rooms with an average of four projects being presented in each of them. Rooms were organized by theme, ranging from crisis disaster response to interactive design and media arts.
Some speakers explored the narratives presented in certain news outlets, and others brought forward solutions to individual and global issues.
The event concluded with FCAT dean Carman Neustaedter thanking participants for their efforts in organizing the conference.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
