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Quest University embarks on its third year

President Helfand confident inaugural class will graduate in 2011
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As the joke goes: there is a university student, and then there is a Quest student.

Caleb Tomlinson said he took one year of undergraduate classes at Thompson Rivers University before deciding to leave behind traditional post-secondary school and transfer to the two-year-old Quest University Canada in Squamish.

"I liked the idea of being able to have a flexible program," explained Tomlinson, who is one of 58 third-year students who make up Quest's inaugural class.

"I was looking at other international development programs and they were all very rigid. They all had required courses the whole way through. I like the idea of being able to choose exactly what type of courses I want to take."

This fall, Canada's first private, liberal arts and science university will see its first batch of third-year students develop their self-directed major or "question." Over the next two years, these students will examine their topic from different angles and eventually present their findings in a public forum.

Tomlinson said he doesn't mind being part of such a high-scale education experiment.

"It definitely has made me more aware," said Tomlinson, who is originally from Merritt, B.C.

"I am certainly not fully aware of the higher education system, but it has made me more aware than I would have been at Thompson Rivers University."

Likewise, Adrienne Dalla-Longa, also in her third year, said she enjoys being part of something new.

When she walks down the university halls, she sees pictures of clubs where she was at their first meeting, and she also got to help write the student council's constitution.

"You can't be at Quest if you aren't open to the idea of change," said Dalla-Longa.

"You are at a new university and things have to change and have to be adaptable. We don't have the same kind of history as other places. That was something I was not comfortable with when I first came here. Now, it is something I fully embrace."

Although it hasn't been around long, Quest has hit a few rocky patches.

One month after the university opened in September 2007 its founder, David Strangway, stepped down as president. Strangway, who is also the former president at the University of British Columbia, temporarily sat on Quest's board of directors before retiring to Kelowna, B.C.

The following year, in August 2008, the university announced it was forming an alliance with the education group CIBT that owns Sprott-Shaw Community College. Through the deal, CIBT would manage Quest's administration and financial functions and the Squamish university would share Sprott-Shaw's president, Dean Duperron. The deal fell through within a month.

Since that time David Helfand, who is also an astrophysics professor at Columbia University in New York, has served as the university's president.

"It is hard to start a university, and that is why it doesn't happen all the time," said Helfand.

"We like to tell both faculty and students that the people we like are not risk-averse... We have a bunch of hurdles to overcome, but I think we are moving very nicely towards overcoming them."

Helfand said Quest already has its budget approved for next year and he is confident the university will see its first graduating class on schedule in 2011.

About 58 of the first 74 students in the Quest's inaugural class are still at the university.

Helfand added that this year Quest welcomed 105 first-year students onto its campus, up 30 per cent from last year. About 55 per cent of the new students are from Canada and 27 per cent are from the United States. Switzerland, Mexico, China, and Hong Kong are also represented within the class mix.

The president said he is happy with Quest's intensive three-week block class structure as well as the strong student and faculty interactions.

To date, there are about 14 full-time faculty members and the university also hosts a number of visiting professors. Last year, they had professors visit from Harvard and Columbia. This year they plan to have professors from Princeton, Carleton and the University of British Columbia teach.

"That is another advantage of the block system which never occurred to me," said Helfand. "To get someone to come and teach a course for four weeks is a lot easier than to get someone to come and teach a whole semester, but you still get a whole semester's worth of material."

The block system has also allowed the university to take advantage of the Olympics next year.

Although Helfand couldn't release many details, he said the university will be closed between Christmas and March. During this period, students have several off-campus education options to choose from.

For example, Helfand said about 30 students will go to Argentina to study Spanish, 18 will travel to Borneo to work with the World Wildlife Foundation and seven students will travel with him to New York to study art.

Helfand said he would like to strengthen the tie between Quest and Squamish over the next year.

"We want to find more effective ways of getting that out to the community," said Helfand. "We have a lot of events that are open to the public. A few people do come, but not many."

Tomlinson, who was the president of Quest's student council last year, agreed that the university needs to focus on community interactions with both Squamish and Whistler.

"I would encourage anyone to come up and get more involved and see if there is a talk going on," he said.