The Office of Student Recruitment is organizing an information day for the English CÉGEP academic counsellors on Friday May 3. More than 25 academic advisors from all of the English CÉGEPs and colleges have confirmed their participation on this one-day event entitled “What’s New at Concordia.”

The three Faculties and JMSB will present information update sessions, as will the Office of the Registrar. This first-hand information will enable the advisors to counsel their students on recent major curriculum changes at Concordia, and enable the advisors to remind their students about the all-important admissions procedures and the prerequisites for their programs of choice.

Dr. Lowy will welcome the advisors on campus at a breakfast speech and inform them about the major projects that Concordia will be undertaking in the next year or two.

Meanwhile, out in the field, Concordia’s recruiters have been busy, as always, and report lively interest from potential students at home and abroad.

Nelly Trakas, from the Centre for Mature Students, was a workshop presenter at the Vocational Education Day sponsored by the Lester B. Pearson School Board. She, along with her fellow presenter Michael Whatling, received a substantial amount of interest and have been contacted since by participants.

Julie Chandler, recruiter in Arts and Science, visited several of the top schools in Athens in March, and she and the recruiter from the John Molson School of Business participated in an education fair in Greece.

Julie has also been in Virginia and New York recently. In Virginia, she was part of a discussion panel with five other universities and spoke to about 160 juniors about studying in Canada and at Concordia University, then visited high schools and met college counsellors. She is in New York now, visiting high schools and attending a fair there with a recruiter from the JMSB, and plans to go to several fairs in California in late June, plus a big meeting of U.S. school counsellors in San Antonio, Texas.

The John Molson School of Business has been recruiting as far afield as Dubai, Turkey and Greece. In the latter two countries, Tom Swift linked up with the Canadian Education Centre, an agency associated with the Canadian embassies.

Romesh Vadivel participated for the JMSB in a recruitment junket in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in March, along with 12 other Canadian universities and colleges. As of last week, Romesh has moved on to become an assistant registrar at Dalhousie University, and we wish him the best of luck.

The Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science has doubled enrolment in the past five years and are eagerly awaiting their new state-of-the-art facilities, set to open in 2005. They recently welcomed a group of Quebec high school students, and gave them advice on choosing a CÉGEP program that would lead smoothly into engineering and computer science studies at Concordia.

Eric Goldner, Uzma Mustafa and Amanda French, all of whom work for the university’s Recruitment Office, at least in part, spent much of March visiting dozens of high schools between Toronto and Ottawa, and lining up fall visits. University admissions officers across Canada, but particularly in Ontario, are braced for the double cohort in fall 2003, owing to the end of Grade 13 in Canada’s most populous province.

The Recruitment Office’s Bernard Pomerleau was kept hopping on a recent visit to New York, and has been active in the New England states, a busy market for Concordia.