4 posts tagged “nscc”

Five years ago I started working at the Nova Scotia Community College at the Halifax Campus which was located on Bell Road in a beautiful old building that was first built in the 1920s. It was a vocational high school and then a community college. The building had some nice art deco details and had a lot of character and a great location beside Citadel Hill right beside downtown Halifax.
After working there for a few years there was the very exciting announcement of a development initiative that would result in a revitalization of the entire Community College system in Nova Scotia. The largest and most exciting part of the initiative was the building of a new campus in Dartmouth (across the harbour from Halifax, but part of the Halifax Regional Municipality). The saddest part was that the location at Bell Road would be replaced with a new high school. With the time frames of the construction it meant that there would be a two-year gap between our moving out and the new building opening, which meant that we needed to find temporary space for two years.
The temporary location was in the middle of downtown Halifax on Granville Street. It was much smaller, but with a great location. Even though it's only about 5 or 6 blocks away from Bell Road, it made a huge difference and changed the way that I saw the city.
So now we've moved again and I've said goodbye to another location that saw two years of Screen Arts learners pass through and a number of classes and productions. Now it's a whole new beginning with a new and larger facility filled with possibilities. It's also an adjustment as I'm moving from sharing an office with the other full-time faculty member to sharing a cubicle with her in a cluster with 16 other faculty members. We're adjusting to the space, but the biggest challenge is working in an office without sunlight as the window is at the other end of the cubicle farm. So I'm hoping that this means I'll spend less time at my desk and more time out in the building which is filled with light.
One adjustment that we made the day after we moved was to subvert the headache-inducing fluorescent lights that lined the ceiling. We found a ladder and twisted the bulbs out over our cubicles and are using desk lamps, which provide a more personal and intimate feeling to the place. Now I have to figure out how to decorate and personalize my space!
But what I will miss the most about the downtown location isn't in the campus at all, but a few blocks away in The Mud Room Cafe. I first went in when one of the learners in the class mentioned that they had great coffee and breakfast bagels (a Montreal bagel toasted with egg and cheese), so I checked it out and started going in frequently. Then I got to know the people there and started getting a coffee in the morning and having my lunch there every day. As I went in every day I was able to find out more about the people who worked there and was able to share incremental conversations with them in between the bustle of the coffee shop. It was a nice place to go to get away from work and relax before going back to work, which is fun, but a bit stressful and demanding at times. I could always count on a smile, good food, darn good coffee and friendship there. I will still go in when I have a chance and through electronic means I can still stay in touch, but it's not the same as being there in person. But things can't stay the same forever and what makes things special is that they are not unlimited and we have to value the people that we meet and the stories that we share.

Four and half years ago I started working for the Nova Scotia Community College teaching in the Screen Arts program. It was based at the Halifax Campus of NSCC on Bell Road, right beside Citadel Hill in a beautiful old building built in the 1920s. It was originally the Vocational High School and Nova Scotia has the distinction of being the last Canadian province to establish a Community College in 1988. So it's a young organization and it's dynamic and changing.
Aside from the wonderful colleagues that I'm lucky to work with there was a great sense of community that existed at Bell Road (as we called the institution). While I teach in the Applied Arts, there were many other programs based there and it created a great dynamic between learners, staff and faculty.

But in June of 2005 the campus closed to make way for a new high school as we were moving to a new, larger, state-of-the-art facility that was being built on the other side of Halifax harbour. With the new campus not being completed until January of 2007, we had to find a temporary home. Other campuses took in several of the programs with the exception of Applied Arts. Right now the Applied Arts programs are downtown in Halifax in a satellite location that is just two floors in a much smaller space. While it's a great location with great people, the homogeneity of the programs and the lack of campus services and a good array of restaurants, cafés and stores close by means that there isn't the same feeling as before.
Now the new campus is just about done and on the latest tour today it was great to see how the building has taken shape. It's a modern building that is large, but welcoming with lots of natural light coming in. The side that faces the harbour is almost completely glass and has the best view of Halifax that I've ever seen. Inside it's the length of three football fields and five stories high with the spacious central hall on the second floor extending up to the fifth floor. The new location and collection of 1700 learners, 150 staff and faculty, and a new mix of programs will create a new dynamic that I think will recapture some of the magic that we had at Bell Road. We move out of our temporary home at the end of May and in the Fall we will start classes at the new campus and it will be great to be in our new home.