{"id":269,"date":"2008-06-09T11:20:52","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T18:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=269"},"modified":"2008-06-09T11:20:52","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T18:20:52","slug":"life-plan-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/06\/09\/life-plan-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Plan #4"},"content":{"rendered":"

The realistic life plans #1 and #2 are going to have to wait longer. This is a companion to the fanciful Life Plan #3<\/a>. First, the context…<\/p>\n

I went out to Hats Off Day<\/a> on Saturday. It’s the Burnaby Heights festival-thing. They close Hastings from Gamma to Boundary and have your general civic festivities: a parade, car show, local merchants, etc.<\/p>\n

What I didn’t get many pictures of were the PR booths. These are pretty common anywhere there is a gathers. They are used by groups that want to get the word out one way or the other: BC Hydro Powersmart, local politicians, emergency preparedness, and so on. I did get a picture of the kids activity that Parks Canada<\/a> had: kids put down forts and trading posts on the map and then they were told why it was\/wasn’t a good place for one.<\/p>\n

While I was out there, fresh off the SFU Open House<\/a>, I started to think about the University’s public outreach activities. Or more to the point, our lack of them. Core premise to the line of thought here: the vast majority of the University’s budget comes out of the public purse in one way or another. (Sorry, but your tuition dollars are only like a third of the cost of your education.) The public should feel involved in what we do.<\/p>\n

This brings us to Life Plan #4<\/strong>. It involves getting job that doesn’t actually exist: SFU Outreach Coordinator. The job would be to put together a roadshow that could go around to these things and show the community what we do, and subtly attempt to convince them that it’s important.<\/p>\n

Many faculty members already do school visits (for their kids classes or whatever) and this might be a way to support those a little too. Presumably, this would also be the point person for the Open House.<\/p>\n

If it was me, I’d put together a list of a dozen or two faculty members that had demos that could be taken out (either by them or their grad students) and would be understandable down to about 8 years old. There were a bunch of these at the Open House; it shouldn’t be too hard to find them. If there’s an understandable open question at the end of the demo, all the better.<\/p>\n

At each community festival we can get to, take one or two research demos, preferably with faculty\/grads who are actually part of that community. I’d pair that with some kind of “what SFU does” posters to give people an idea of what a university is actually for. We’d probably need swag or a prize draw to get people to the table too.<\/p>\n

So there’s Life Plan #4: I want a job that doesn’t exist, paid for out of a budget that doesn’t exist, to do something that isn’t done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The realistic life plans #1 and #2 are going to have to wait longer. This is a companion to the fanciful Life Plan #3. First, the context… I went out to Hats Off Day on Saturday. It’s the Burnaby Heights festival-thing. They close Hastings from Gamma to Boundary and have your general civic festivities: a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}