SFU Vancouver opened its doors to the public at Harbour Centre last Wednesday as part of SFU’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
Nearly 800 people attended the event, which featured over 37 exhibitors representing various departments, programs, and offices from all five buildings that comprise the Vancouver campus.
The opening ceremony featured an address by President Andrew Petter, performances by the Woodward’s Community Singers, SFU Pipe Band, and William Lindsay from the Office for Aboriginal Peoples, the latter of which recently opened a First Peoples gathering space at the campus.
Event coordinator Kamilah Charters-Gabanek noted the performances were one of the highlights of the night. “The Woodward’s Community singers is a group out of Woodward’s that is open to anyone in the public, to come into the university space, [. . .] feel welcome into the institution, and make connections here to the community.
“[SFU Vancouver] is a pretty unique place concentrated in several blocks of the downtown core that has so many different groups of people,” Charters-Gabanek continued. “All of the programs that participated and everyone who came out and helped make the Open House a success did a great job of showcasing the types of community engagement that we offer here.”
Attendees were also able to join a guided tour of the Harbour Centre campus, as well as participate in over ten free workshops that were offered throughout the evening. The tours included a visit to a brand new 24,000-square-foot incubator space for the VentureLabs business accelerator on the 12th floor.
The workshops are normally offered with a fee; however, Charters-Gabanek explained that “because of our community engagement mandate, we wanted to offer them to everyone at no cost.
“We had workshops from Career and Volunteer Services on the relationship between a degree and a career,” said Charters-Gabanek. “We also had two of our Beedie professors from the downtown Segal Graduate School of Business, David Hannah and Ian McCarthy, host two workshops. One was on the fundamentals of effective negotiation, and the other was on learning from creative consumers.”
The rest of the workshops were hosted by SFU Continuing Studies, which was the original group of programs based in Vancouver when the campus opened 25 years ago. Altogether, Charters-Gabanek explained, the workshops gave people a sense of the variety of programs and courses offered at the Vancouver campus.
Laurie Anderson, Executive Director of SFU Vancouver, commented, “By any measure, the SFU Vancouver Open House was a successful evening: positive vibe, lots of interest at the program information tables, good attendance at the workshops and many people mingling until close.”
Said Charters-Gabanek, “I think we did a really good job of showcasing the variety of not only what we offer at our campus, but how we offer it, too — that people can come into the university in so many different capacities, whether they’re an undergraduate student, a graduate student, a lifelong learner, a mid-career professional, or honestly just anyone from the community, [they] could come in and connect.”
