If you follow City Hall even a little bit, you probably recognize York alumna Jennifer Keesmaat by now. Eight months into her job as Toronto’s chief planner, she’s the closest thing the city bureaucracy has to a rock star, reported The Grid April 17…. Born in Hamilton, Keesmaat studied philosophy and English at Western University and had originally planned to attend law school….After a friend persuaded her to read Jane Jacobs’s urbanist bible The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she was hooked. She and her husband, Tom Freeman, moved in with his parents in Etobicoke while she studied urban planning at York University in the 1990s. Read full story.
Schulich students award Matthias Kipping with teaching excellence award
A Schulich business history professor is the recipient of a $15,000 teaching excellence award, reported the North York Mirror April 18. Business history Chair and policy Professor Matthias Kipping has won the top prize in the student-run Seymour Schulich Teaching Excellence Awards program. The awards were presented by Inder Dhillon and Bori Csillag, president and vice-president of the Graduate Business Council respectively, on behalf of the school’s 1,138 master’s students. Read full story.
My job: Senior coordinator of exhibitions at TIFF Bell Lightbox, video artist and independent curator
“My job is to help with the long-lead planning for exhibitions, so I project-manage on the administration side related to deadlines, budgeting and some of our contracts. Basically, I do all the unglamorous admin paperwork that goes into producing an exhibition,” wrote Schulich School of Business alumna Jennifer Matotek in NOW Magazine’s April 18-25 issue. “I did my undergraduate studies at University of Toronto at Mississauga. I took art and history because I was interested in both the academic side and the practical, studio side. I worked in galleries for a few years and then went back to school to pursue my master’s in art history at York University. I did the diploma in curatorial studies and then ended up getting my master’s in business administration at the Schulich School of Business.” Read full story.
Who says accountants are boring? How one student’s accounting-based video game took the online world by storm
When Cary Walkin went back to school to complete an MBA at the Schulich School of Business, his main goal was to strengthen and diversify his business acumen….What he ended up doing, however, was realizing a childhood dream by combining his two passions, accounting and video game design, by creating a computer game based on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and promoting it through a specialized marketing course within Schulich’s MBA program, reported the Financial Post April 12. Now set to graduate in two weeks, Walkin’s game, Arena.Xlsm, has gone viral, generating international buzz in the gaming industry and turning his accounting career upside down. Read full story.