UB

Office of the Provost

Announcements Archive

Transforming the University at Buffalo’s
Undergraduate Education

11 April 2007

Dear Colleagues,

On a beautiful early spring day on the last Saturday in March, the University at Buffalo was teeming with prospective students and their families—touring campus and meeting with faculty, our deans, academic advisors, and current students. This annual event, known as Preview Day, gives our entire UB family an opportunity to share with prospective students the many unique educational experiences only a 21st century research university can provide.

To be honest, I think I enjoy Preview Day as much as our guests as I have the opportunity to talk with many of our nation’s brightest, most ambitious, and terrifically eager students. This year, my colleagues and I spoke of how we, at the University at Buffalo, are committed to providing our students transformative educational experiences across the vast spectrum of our university’s curricular and extra-curricular activities.

Of course, we seized the Preview Day opportunity to share our excitement about UB and its rich tradition of scholarly excellence. And, how today the University at Buffalo provides our students an educational experience distinctly expressed through genuine opportunities to engage in inquiry and discovery, service learning, and leadership in a globalized world. As we ponder our world today and our world of the future, we seek to seamlessly connect our students’ formal educational experiences to the realities of the world in which we exist. The obvious objective is to ensure curricula across the disciplines are relevant, inspiring, and progressive. Perhaps not as obvious is our objective to provide our students with an education that is inherently grounded in the understanding and valuing the vast potential of our world community.

In traditional academic terms, we believe these worthy goals may be achieved through providing our students with relevant, inspiring, and progressive curricula. But of course, this is not sufficient. We are mindful that those values which ground teaching and curricula make education relevant and meaningful—today and throughout the generations. At the University at Buffalo we believe pedagogy—the art of teaching—must be grounded in civil discourse through a valuing of multiple perspectives and ideas so that the decision may be reached through informed understanding. Moreover, we believe that enlightened citizenship must be cultivated through expanding our students intellectual and cultural understandings facilitated in part through experiences a diverse campus community provides and expansive opportunities for study abroad.

The contemporary expression of UB’s rich tradition is evident in a robust portfolio of distinctive and transformative educational experiences, which I believe include providing undergraduate students with opportunities to participate in their own (faculty-mentored) research. In this globalized information age, we believe it is our responsibility to foster in our students their abilities to investigate and discover, and further, to discern among competing claims. A particular manifestation of this responsibility is our Discovery Seminar Program. Distinguished faculty from across the disciplines lead small interactive seminars designed to connect the academic discipline to the fascinatingly dynamic realities of our 21st century world. When the opportunity was presented to teach a small undergraduate seminar, I could not resist. The students in my Data Mining seminar have been terrifically engaged and enthusiastic learners. Each week I prepare my seminar by outlining learning objectives and sketching out contextual information, and in turn, each week my students bring to class their own informed inquiries enhancing our discussion and expanding our knowledge and understanding of our academic subject.

Expanding the educational spectrum from the traditional classroom experience to the experiential, UB’s undergraduate academies will provide students with learning environments that resonate with their aspirations as student, scholar, and enlightened citizen. The Research Exploration Academy and the Civic Engagement Academy afford participating students with the opportunity to be part of—through workshops, seminars, experiential projects, and lectures—a small intellectually dynamic academic and social community. Students in our Research Exploration Academy will have the opportunity to be actively engaged in primary research. Through these faculty-mentored experiences, students will formulate novel questions and seek answers to those inquiries through their own laboratory research, humanities related scholarship, and original creative work. Participating Civic Engagement Academy students will have many curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to broaden their world-view and expand their knowledge regarding the salient cultural, political, and socio-economic issues of today and with the benefit of their informed perspective will learn how to contribute to the betterment of society.

Of course, an integral component of becoming an enlightened and active citizen is to be able to understand and appreciate the world beyond one’s own personal and cultural perspectives. Sharing their own experiences, our students tell us as they traverse, study, learn, and live in a cosmopolitan campus community, they develop an inherent respect and appreciation of our intellectually and internationally diverse student body. We believe these experiences contribute to our university’s incredible rate of study abroad participation—five times the national average!

The relevance, impact, and reach of a University at Buffalo education—in many ways—are evident with the success of our Honors Program. This fall, UB Honors Program will expand its academic reach and welcomed the largest incoming class in its history. Our Honors Program students will have the benefit of an expanded curriculum, opportunities to participate in faculty-mentored undergraduate research (Undergraduate Academy, summer research, thesis project), and seminar experiences.

As I write, we are preparing our university’s annual event to recognize and celebrate our students’ creative and scholarly excellence. Every April, the University at Buffalo dedicates a day in celebration of our students’ academic excellence inviting our campus community and extended families to an exhibition of undergraduate research and artistic work and concluding with formal award presentations. A tribute to the caliber of UB’s student scholars, this year two of our students received national scholarship awards—Kelly R. Miller was awarded with the Morris K. Udall Scholarship and Andrew M. Paluch was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. And, two of our students received the venerated Fulbright Scholarship—Karen Corey was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Germany, and Melinda Wright was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Hearty congratulations to our students!

As I paused for a moment (or two) at our University’s Preview Day, I reflected that the relevancy, impact, and reach of a UB education are explicitly inherent upon our ability to demonstrate the connectedness of curriculum, pedagogy, and the many and diverse student experiential experiences to the world in which it exists. I further reflected that the relevancy, impact, and reach of a University at Buffalo education—today and for generations to come—is accomplished when we embrace our role in cultivating and harnessing the vast potential of our students so, together, we may fulfill the promise of our collective humanity. Knowing the unlimited potential of our students supported by the caring mentorship of our distinguished faculty, I believe we are on our way to fulfilling this promise.

Sincerely,

Satish K. Tripathi
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs