Beginning March 9, the College of Arts will be hosting a series of “Mad Monday” challenges, offering UFV arts students the opportunity to work together to solve institutional problems and compete for cash prizes.
The first challenge, titled “Branding of College of Arts Experiential Learning Project,” will be held on March 9, with further challenges held each Monday through the end of the month.
Mad Monday challenges pit two teams of four College of Arts students against one another and task them with inventing solutions to institutional problems over the course of an afternoon. Participating teams must contain four members: two international students and two domestic students, and students must be from at least two different disciplines.
Participants in each challenge will receive $100 for their time, and the team selected as winners by faculty judges will receive an additional $500 that can either be split between teammates, or put toward a sponsored event such as a group dinner, movie outing, or escape room visit.
Linda Pardy, associate dean of students, is one of the key figures behind the Mad Monday initiative. Pardy said that the main source of inspiration for Mad Mondays are hackathons: a collaborative practice in IT where interdisciplinary teams are given large problems and limited time, and must work together to invent solutions.
“This is the same principle,” she said. “It’s a format that’s been used in industry a lot … in the healthcare profession, in design work and industrial design. And what we’re realizing is that arts graduates are a real integral part of those teams.”
For example, Pardy said the “Scalable Experiential Learning challenge,” which will be held on March 30, will task participants with considering different kinds of work-integrated learning opportunities. She describes these as various experiential alternatives to traditional co-op work, which could allow UFV arts students to get valuable hands-on experience in their fields.
“What we want to know from students is which of these things would you want to do? Which of these things would you value? … We’ve got a whole list of questions that we want students to answer and problem-solve amongst themselves,” Pardy said.
According to Pardy, the primary purpose of Mad Mondays is to give students a chance to gain valuable problem-solving experience that looks good on a resume. The current set of challenges will also provide administrators with valuable insight into what College of Arts students might want out of their education, but Pardy said she hopes to eventually expand the scope of the challenges even more, allowing students to engage with issues beyond the university.
“We’d like to get the community to bring challenges to us. [The current] challenges are challenges we have inside the institution, but we’ve got employers and community members that have the same types of problems that they would like input on, and that would also help the students get connected to employers,” she said.
Mad Mondays are the first project to come out of the new Student Experience Design (SXD) Lab, an initiative organized by the office of the provost that is designed to give arts students a voice in how their education is shaped. “The design lab allows us to get input from students,” said Pardy. “It’s a vehicle. This is a pilot project that got some funding from the provost’s office on the fund for innovative teaching.”
Aside from Mad Mondays, which may eventually expand to allow for larger events if additional funding can be acquired, Pardy said the SXD Lab will be seeking other ways to get student input, and hopes to begin monthly programming in September. She also cited criticism over the College of Arts’ decision to add a portfolio requirement to degrees as exactly the kind of issue she hopes the SXD Lab can address.
“[The portfolio courses] need a ton of work,” she said. “So we see the design lab as the place for student input to have a constant. We should be able to bring the courses in and let students pick them apart.”
