Hi I'm Amy Jones-Timoney from the University of Kentucky and I'm here with
Mark Kornbluh, who is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Thank you
so much for being with us today!
Oh, my pleasure
You know we're walking on kind of the main part of campus today because your
college covers a lot of grounds. Why does your college touch the lives of so many
of our students?
Well, we're really central to every aspect of the
university, the university was born around arts and sciences, we offer the
most majors, most minors, every student, every undergraduate student takes
significant number of classes in the College of Arts and Sciences. Our mission
is that really identical to the university, which is to advance knowledge
world-class research to teach a new generation of students and to impact
Lexington the Commonwealth and the world beyond, so, teaching research and service.
You know a lot of people talk about the importance of interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary work on a college campus. What kinds of partnerships do you
all have with other colleges within the university to kind of enhance the
student experience? So, we work with the other colleges in a hundred different
ways: we have majors that we share with other colleges, so we offered probably
one of our most advanced science majors is neuroscience and it's housed in our
biology department but our psychology faculty work with it and it's the
College of Medicine and College of Pharmacy are essential to it, we
host African-American and Africana studies for the whole University, we
have a big partnership with the College of Business, one of our newest majors is
U.S. culture and American business practices, so we have really great
relations with other colleges
So, we made our way over to the "Chem-Phys" building, which is an important place for
all the students here at UK, especially your arts and science students. Tell me a
little bit about the opportunities that your students have here at UK.
So, we're really committed to having students have what we call high impact learning
experiences. So, for example, for our science students we're really eager for
them to have opportunities to be involved in research in laboratories,
it's to our advantage to have a medical school on this campus, for example,
because we have so many biology and chemistry majors working in different
labs in the medical school, as well as with our own faculty labs.
We also look for opportunities for students to get internships, we have a wide range
of internships programs. Probably the most exciting new program is we have UK
and DC program now, where our goal is to send 25 students a
semester, three semesters a year, and we're partnering with the president's
office on doing that and working with our congressional delegation. We also do
a really committed to study abroad, we send the most students abroad of any
college here, we send students to 50 countries in any given year on
a lot of different experiences. One that excites me the most is we have a program,
that we run through the College of Arts and Sciences, where students do
internships in Cape Town South Africa, so it combines internships and study abroad.
They work with some of the neediest communities in Cape Town, work closely
with children of poor families or sometimes in a battered women's shelter.
It's a really great opportunity! The world is closer, it's a one small place
in a way it never was before and it's been never more important for our
students to understand the great diversity in the world, different
cultures, different places to be comfortable to work in the world, they
can major in eleven different languages, so, we want students to be able to learn
the languages to talk to people, as well, and to learn about the culture,
the history, religion. Science today is totally international!
Our faculty collaborates with scientists all over the world and we have
opportunities for graduate, as well as undergraduate students, to work in labs
overseas and to see, you know, science is one world today.
We've made our way to
the Don and Cathy Jacobs science building, which, I know, is a building that
you're very proud of.
Absolutely! We wanted a building where it was designed
around active learning, so the building is designed, every laboratory, every
classroom is designed so that students can be engaged actively in their
learning. The lecture halls have two rows of seats on each riser, so the students
can participate hour long talking in there, all the small
classrooms are arranged for student be engaged. We wanted a place where
science students, this would be their home and, as we go inside, you see that
there's so much space here designed for students to hang out they like to study
collaboratively today, they like to be part of a public space. We wanted to make
science visible. You can see through all the labs, you can see what's going on, the
building, sort of, mirrors from lower levels of Science on up to upper so that
the first-year students can see where they're gonna go. The students love this
building, it's two years old, you look at it now it looks like we opened it
yesterday because they take such good care of it. On parents weekend, I've
never seen students "Hey, mom, dad, come see my science building!", but it happens every
weekend, it's just amazing!
So, I would imagine, this is something
great for prospective students to see. Why are students choosing the UK College
of Arts and Sciences? And what are they like?
We have the most
diverse student body in the country, so we have the most African-American and
Latino students, we offer the disciplines that are at the root of all professions,
so, the humanities of Social Sciences the Natural Sciences. This is a world class
building, there is no better place to do science teaching in the country than in
this building. So, the mission of our flagship university is to link research
with teaching, so our faculty are world class researchers. The faculty who are teaching
in this building are to engage in new breakthroughs in regenerative biology in
developing new materials for batteries that will change how we work with
electricity, for looking at physics in a way that will transform, get us off of
fossil fuels, just really exciting stuff. In the humanities and social sciences, we
have some of the world's best known faculty members. Our English department
has two Guggenheim Award winners, I don't think any other English apartment in the
country has a physics department has the most members of the American physics
Society, which is what you're elected to if you're a real amazing researcher as
any of any department in the country. So, from the humanities through to the
sciences we have faculty that are doing cutting-edge research, and that's what,
let me go back to students, that's what makes it so exciting to be a student
here, because you're taking classes with people who are baking the frontiers of
knowledge and so you're part of that, and, to go back to what we talked to before,
the students get to work in those laboratories they get to go overseas
with the faculty member doing surveys, they whether social science humanities
or Natural Sciences that our undergrads are engaged in that world class research.
So, last question. What is your favorite part about leading the College
of Arts and Sciences at UK?
I'm just so proud to be
the faculty leader of this amazing faculty and these wonderful students.
It's an honor beyond any I ever expected in my career to be Dean of this faculty
and I just love it!