By Mary Chan
University of Calgary students were cerebrally challenged this week as Academic Awareness Week arose again.
"Academic Awareness Week is designed to enhance students’ knowledge of the different options that they have available in their studies," said Co-organizer Brent Robinson. "It is also designed to give faculties access to recruiting students on the students’ home turf."
The "week", which ran from Feb. 14-16, consisted of displays, Academic Jeopardy and seminars which covered getting into grad school, marketing a degree, and "Using Applied Kinesiology to Manage Your Stress."
Tuesday’s presentation was "How to Market Your Degree," which went over well with the six students who attended.
"I have my math degree and wanted to see what I could do with that," said graduate Holly Allard.
"It was good to get a larger view, more focused on general thing rather than specifics," said third-year Mechanical Engineering student Brendon Lumgair. "It was excellent."
He added, however, that it should have been better advertised.
"There was only one or two posters," he said. "If it was put more to the clubs, more people would be up to this."
The presentations mark an attempt by the organizers to appeal to higher level students.
"Usually there are programs on how to do an appeal or how to choose a major, and these are just not things that the average third- or fourth-year student is interested in," said Robinson. "So with the grad school and marketing degrees seminars we tried to cater to third and fourth years."
Academic Jeopardy, which took place from 1-2 p.m. in the MacEwan Student Centre courtyard each day, was well received, although Tuesday’s round attracted less than five spectators.
"It’s actually a good program," said first-year General Studies student Jennifer Evans. "They have some good questions in there I wouldn’t even have thought to ask."
Academic Awareness Week ran at the same time as Wellness Week, which lead to some conflicts.
"Scheduling problems kind of limited us," said Robinson. "Next year it was all be integrated together, along with some other things, into Service Week so that there will be more coordination between them. Hopefully this means that the attention and events can all be focused on one day and should be good."