Message from Maria Rivera, Managing Director and Scott Liao, Academic Director

As you wrap up your Program Kick Off this week, we trust that you are excited about next week’s launch of Term 1. We hope that the skills you’ve been learning in LDT are setting each of you up to be an effective team member in the courses ahead.

As you heard from Scott earlier last week, three of your four Term 1 courses (Economics, Models & Data, and Accounting) will be in-person, dual-delivery. The fourth course, Leading People in Organizations, will be delivered fully online. For those of you in Toronto, you’ll be expected to attend Economics, Models & Data, and Accounting in-person. For those of you not yet in country, you’ll be able to attend these Term 1 courses online.

By the end of this week, you will receive instructions from the Registrar’s Office as to how to access your Term 1 course schedules. The Registrar’s Office is working on getting as many students as can be in the classroom into the classroom for our in-person, dual-delivery courses within the social distancing and capacity limits under the current provincial guidance.

Currently, the University is operating under the Step 3 of the reopening roadmap of the Province. This means that there are physical distancing requirements that limit the number of seats available in our classrooms and that for a couple of your courses (Models & Data and Accounting) there will not be enough space for all students who are enrolled in class to attend simultaneously. In these courses, the Registrar’s Office will assign students to subgroups and rotate which subgroups attend any given course meeting. The list of subgroup membership will be placed on the course Quercus page. As the provincial guidance on social distancing and room capacities changes, we will adjust the rotation as quickly as we can.

We are happy to report that many international students are joining us each week in Toronto! We encourage all students with study permits to arrive in Toronto as soon as they can safely. For those of you still awaiting study permits, please make sure you are working closely with your Section AD so that they can support you in achieving a successful Term 1 experience.

Finally, this September, all members of the University community coming to campus—including students, staff, faculty, and librarians—will be required to provide proof of full vaccination or register in the University’s rapid screening program, where results will need to be uploaded regularly. You can read more about UCheck (the university’s self-assessment tool) here.

We look forward to seeing you on campus soon!
Maria and Scott