A true appreciation for teaching
Christopher Trueman has spent more than 30 years teaching the ropes to countless students.
Now in his third year as the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science’s associate dean of Academic Affairs, Trueman has a lot more than classes on his plate.
He also carries out administrative duties that include chairing the Student Request Committee, overseeing the faculty’s Academic Information Technology Service, managing the workloads of full-time and part-time faculty members, and overseeing the planning of the departments’ course offerings.
Regardless of his faculty duties, Trueman ensures that he always has one foot in the classroom. “I call teaching my fun,” he says with a smile.
Trueman first joined the university in 1974, shortly after the merger of Sir George Williams University and Loyola College. “I think I was one of the first people officially hired by Concordia,” he says.
He started as a sessional lecturer before he had even completed his master’s degree, which he was pursuing at the time at McGill University. “I was shocked to see that there were students in my class who were older than me!”
He recalls his early days on the Loyola Campus with fondness. He loved teaching right from the start and quickly formed a bond with his students, who could easily relate to the young professor. Trueman went on to earn his PhD at McGill while still teaching a full course load at Concordia. “It was hectic but it was worth it,” he says, as those four years of working and studying gave him a better appreciation of what his students were going through.
Trueman spent his first five years solely at Loyola and remembers his move to the downtown Sir George Williams Campus in 1979 as being quite a culture shock. “I went from tiny classrooms to big lecture halls,” he says. “But I gradually realized that the students at Sir George were not fundamentally different from those at Loyola. They all had the same backgrounds, the same ideas, the same problems.”
He also has good memories of the high-tech equipment that was made available to faculty members back in the day: “We were given round-the-clock access to a PDP 11-20 mini-computer—it was terrific for the work I was doing in computational electromagnetics. It had an impressive 16 kilobytes of memory, which we later expanded to an almost unthinkable 64 kilobytes before eventually getting a hard drive that could store a whopping one megabyte of data!
Times have changed a bit since then,” Trueman says, laughing. “But Concordia has always had facilities that are truly top-notch.”
Although he has worn many hats over the years—including as associate chair, co-op director and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and chair of the General Studies Unit it’s his role as teacher, he says, that’s his true passion. Asked what he likes so much about his job, Trueman gives a simple answer: it’s the students.
“Students are wonderful. They are enthusiastic, they’re interested, they listen to what you have to say, they ask questions.” He especially likes to teach the core undergraduate courses, like electromagnetics, because “you can really reach those students and have a positive influence on what they do and how they process information, right at a crucial stage, the beginning of their career.”
Trueman’s passion has not gone unnoticed: he was awarded the Engineering and Computer Science award for excellence in full-time teaching in 2005-06. And he shows no sign of slowing down.
Related links:
• The Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
• Concordia University Magazine