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On November 17 KTH held its annual celebration with respect to the conferment of new doctors and inauguration of new professors. All PhD students that had defended their thesis during the period of October 1, 2016 to September 29, 2017 were invited to the celebration. In total, 198! persons defended their theses at KTH during that time period, whereof 42 were from the ITM school. This is an impressive number of PhD students. As many of you, KTH is among the top three universities in Western Europe when it comes to the number of students receiving a PhD. Thus, KTH and ITM truly have an impact on the higher education in our nearest region. For those of you that currently are studying for a PhD you should look forward to this celebration. When I have talk to doctors throughout the years they often mention this celebration. I have heard words such as “I was happy when I defended my thesis but it did not sink in to me that I actually had become a doctor until I stepped up to the stage to receive a diploma. I was nervous to enter in front of the audience at that moment, but standing there to receive applauses from the audience made me feel warm and proud inside”. I think that most former PhD students finishing a PhD can recognize themselves in those words.
History was also made at KTH and ITM during this ceremony. KTH inaugurated the first to professors at the Department of Sustainable Production Development. Monica Bellgran has obtained the position The Leif Östling professorship in Industrial Production Management and Magnus
Wiktorsson has become a professor in Production Logistics. We welcome both of these new professors to ITM and we are looking forward to follow your future progress.
The formal part of the celebration started at the concert hall in Stockholm. Thereafter, buses took the participants to the city hall. Here, more than 900 people enjoyed a fantastic dinner in the blue hall. Afterwards, a live band played in the golden hall. It was both traditional waltz as well as more modern dance music. Overall, I am convinced that the new doctors and professors will remember this evening for the rest of their lives!
Those of you that are interested in reading more about this and former year’s celebrations can read more here.
As I write this blog the snow is falling outside the window. This is a sign that the fall has left and that we have entered the last season of the year, namely the winter. During this period people like us living close to the “north pole” enters a calmer stage of our lives. It feels so nice to light candles at home and snuggle up in your favorite sofa to read a book. Of course, those of you with young children will be chased outside to enjoy winter activities. Myself, I enjoy to light a fire in my stove and then sit and try to solve a cross word puzzle.
/Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean
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Harassment
With the “metoo movement”, there should no longer be any doubts that sexual harassment occurs in all types of organisation and that there is an organisational issue.
At KTH, a case management system is currently under development. KTH intends to implement a major knowledge enhancement initiative on sexual harassment as part of its gender integration effort.
Education
The examination period is coming to an end for period 1. Exams have been held, exam papers scanned, and grade registration in LADOK is underway. We are now preparing for the re-examination period in December and exam period 2 at the beginning of January.
Financial news
The school is bringing in an additional resource in connection with EU accounting. It is mainly within the EU that external funds are increasing, and this requires specific skills and experience to maintain quality in the accounting area.
Plan Edit
The school has acquired a planning tool for all the organisation’s resources, teachers, classes, subjects, groups, etc. This will give us an opportunity to obtain an overview of planned and used resources. The purpose is mainly to be able to use this in a work environment perspective. What does our employees’ work situation really look like?
Plan Edit allows real-time monitoring of scheduled resources, which gives a comprehensive overview of budgeted and used resources. The school has decided to test-run Plan Edit for 2018/19. The school will then conduct a follow-up/analysis.
Sincerely,
Christina Carlsson, Head of Administration
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The ITM School will from January 1st be welcoming one more department – Department of Learning – which basically corresponds to the more academic part of the current ECE School. The remaining part is the KTH Library which will be organised under the central KTH administration. A working group including me, Arnold Pears (head of Department of Learning), Maria Haglund (head of the KTH Library) and Anders Lundgren (head of KTH Administration) is now working out the details of what and how this transfer of organisations will be performed. The Department of Learning will remain in its current premises.
Our president – Sigbritt Karlsson – is about to request development plans 2018-2023 from the KTH Schools, the tentative deadline is set to end of June 2018. This will be one central topic of the annual ITM Leaders’ Conference which takes place January 11-12 2018. The school will, in one way or the other, try to involve as many as possible in the process of creating the next development plan. Our strategic council with external and internal representatives (Anna Jerbrant, Jenny Janhager Stier, Claes Tisell, Jessica Matz Hammarlund and Charlotte Holgersson) will at its next meeting on March 7 have the development plan as the main topic. Discussing with the internal representatives is one way to be involved.
On December 18 in the afternoon a combined Faculty Club and end of year come-together will be arranged. The topic of the faculty club will be a discussion on how we perform and use course analysis to stay on top!
Jan Wikander, Dean of School
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Now the first period of this academic year has passed and I hope you all consider the courses and examinations within your responsibility as successful.
When it comes to educational issues – at both ITM-school level as well as KTH level – several important things are ongoing:
The first very important, and gratifying, thing is that the President (together with the Vice Dean) of KTH decided to transform the track Industrial technology and sustainability (within CMAST) into a separate master of science in engineering program. This is something that the ITM-school has worked for during a long time and therefore this is very welcome news.
I also hope that all teachers with courses that ends in P1 has seen the information from the canvas project that they this week released a new feature that facilitates performance reporting from Canvas to Ladok. The function is accessed from the left menu in all canvas webpages under the name “Exportera Resultat (BETA)”. If you have any questions about this please contact the Canvas project manager Michael Welin-Berger.
Finally, KTH has decided to implement målrelaterade betygskriterier (target-related grading criterias) on all courses with a graduated grading scale. These målrelaterade betygskriterier are to be introduced to all KTH courses in a step by step model from now on. This means that from HT18 all new courses needs to have målrelaterade betygskriterier, from HT19 all courses that are included in special eligibility needs to have it and from HT20 every course at KTH will have målrelaterade betygskriterier. It is the examiner’s responsibility that the grading criteria is published in the course PM prior to course start, and also that they are available after the course has been completed. If you want to read more about this view document v-2017-0740 at kth.se.
/ Anna Jerbrant, GA
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This week KTH will carry out an internal review of the environmental work that is done at ITM, as part of their annually evaluations at all schools. During this review they will discuss many topics as well as meet many people. First, they will discuss how the management of ITM supports the activities with our working environment, including specific groups where we discuss the progress regarding our systematic work focusing on the different part of the environment. They will also review how we work systematically on how to handle waste and to decrease the waste at the departments, handle chemicals, fire hazardous materials, etc. Moreover, how we change our habits to replace travels with web meetings etc. to decrease the impact on the environment. Based on this internal review ITM will make a plan to make improvements to become even better. Remember that all of us as individuals can help to improve the environment by, for example, sort materials instead of throwing them away in the regular trash.
Finally, I wish to say some words about wellness activities to promote your health. You have a description of the wellness activities organized by ITM at the ITM intranet.
In addition, as you all know we are approaching darker days. As the days become shorter and the rain and snow appears we all feel that it becomes more difficult to find the motivation to carry out outdoor activities. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend you to fight that resistance and take a walk to get some fresh air and to catch the few glimpses of sun. When I do it I feel that I get so much energy, which I also hope you do. When it comes to other wellness activities I have given up floorball due to a problem with my knee. Instead, I started weight lifting with my son as the personal trainer. This is not maybe the best choice of trainer, since he enjoys pushing his father to lift heavier and heavier weights!
/Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean of School
