Fraternal Workshop for Professors of San Pablo

That's a poor translation of "Jornada Confraternidad Profesor San Pablo". Today all the faculty met at a local hotel to spend the day talking about what it should mean to be a professor working for the Universidad Catolica San Pablo.

The university is only 10 years old. It has 3000 students and a brand new campus. The Computer Science Dept is still in the old campus until they build a new floor onto the new campus building! Young though it is there are some remarkable statistics:

46 of the 50 Peruvian students doing graduate studies in Computer Science in Brasil come from Arequipa, a majority of those from San Pablo.

San Pablo ranks third in Peru in the number of refereed publications by its faculty and students last year (in year 9).



Why does a university need such a workshop? Well, for starters it is only 10 years old and as you can see from the pictures of the meeting, the faculty is very young. In some ways, nothing is being left to chance. They have started very well and want to avoid mis-steps I guess.

There were two interesting parts to the day for me. In the first of these we sat down as a small breakout groups (the 10 professors from CS in our case) and tried to describe the personal, professional and conduct aspects of the ideal profile of a professor at San Pablo. I was one of the oldest people there and I found it interesting that while others spoke in generalities - punctuality, rigor, etc - my take on these things came from my practical experience. I gave examples of what I thought was being a good professor on my part.

The second part I liked was a talk by the professor who is the faculty rep on the College Council. He gave a talk on Assertive Communication and he used as his vehicle, the events surrounding the shootings at Virginia Tech earlier this year. How did so many faculty fail to raise the alarm when so many felt intimidated by the student. His point was that it wasn't just the President's fault or the Chief of Police's fault but everyone's fault and he speculated that the environment at that college didn't encourage faculty and students to assert themselves. He went on to give a list of symptoms that indicate this lack of assertiveness, such as the over use of titles. Of course, he was trying to bring the topic closer to home and indirectly saying that the university here wouldn't be well served by a docile faculty. It was a great talk.

So on to some pictures.

Graciela and Gina

Graciela did her grad studies in Brasil so falamos um pouco. Gaciela teaches Software Engineering. There are four Software Engineering courses in the program here, New Paltz has one. Gina is my assistant in Data Base II. She'll end up learning more than the students themselves.

Maria Alejandra

Maria Alejandra is in the CS department because her name tag is the same colour as ours. But when I asked her what she teaches she said "Artes Plasticas" which we call Fine Arts. So I'm not exactly sure just what she teaches to our students. I don't know the other people's names.


Wilbur and Edward

Wilbur lives near me. Edward is almost the twin of Forest Whittaker, the actor, although it doesn't appear so here.


Nicolas and Wilbur

Nicolas is a member of the department who has taken a job in the Department of Education for a year (or so he says). He has degrees in law, business and computer science and can't make up his mind about things. He is Giuliana's husband. She showed up in a much earlier posting, our first day in Arequipa.


Did you notice how many female faculty members there are in Computer Science?