Any news on that town hall meeting you guys had?
Yeah, just had it yesterday afternoon.
It won't really affect second year students. It won't really affect incoming students, apart from what they were told about some of the specific locations of some amenities. These are the differences that we, as first year students, are going to probably notice between this year and next:
- Possible change in some of the ASU faculty that teaches here. I guess they are all welcome to stay and maintain a dual role working at ASU and teaching here at UACOM-Phx. It sounded like some would leave, some would decrease their teaching time committment, and some would stay on 100%. We don't know for sure, but that's what seems like is going to happen.
- Somewhat unrelated to the dissolution of the partnership (I guess this was already planned), bottom two floors of our research building is shifting its focus from biomedical informatics to wet lab research. Unsure how this will affect the future of biomedical informatics presence on our campus. Admins are saying that they hope to keep it as a strong presence since its one of the most special features of our school, but many of the students are hoping its presence diminishes since it is such a specialized field. The sentiment is... if it is such a specialized field, why are we teaching this to 1st/2nd year medical students? Why don't we just do a clinical informatics fellowship down the road if we're really interested in it?
- Possible change of scenery for some of the amenities offered. Support staff and the dean of students is working on ensuring we have comparable amenities that we had access to through our partership with ASU (downtown Y gym access, downtown ASU library access, ability to participate in intramural sports with ASU, etc). We were promised "similar, if not identical, amenities" at the town hall meeting, but they are still working on sorting out specific details.
Apart from these points, none of the changes are really going to affect the students. There will be quite a few changes due to the break up, but it will mainly affect how space is utilized in the new Health Sciences Education Building (ASU nursing will no longer have a presence there) and other aspects either far off down the road or unrelated to student life. A lot of other things were discussed, but these were the main points I recall/that were important to me. Feel free to message me with any questions you guys have.
See everyone at second look!