A paper shredder sits inside Baljit Singh’s sparsely furnished office at Saskatoon’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine.
The professor, researcher and faculty-in-residence uses it to keep his busy life organized and free of clutter.
When students arrive with their papers, he looks at them immediately. He handles correspondence the same way.
“I open my mail and respond. I bring only paper to the office that needs a second look and then dispose of that by the end of the day,” he said.
“Other people’s time is very precious and I pay attention to that,” said Baljit, who thinks the practice prompts people to respond more quickly to his requests.
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The office looks unfinished, with a few open shelves that he plans to consolidate into one, a cupboard, filing cabinet, desk and large empty space on one side.
There he and a group of seven first-year students sit on the floor and participate in a biomedical rounds class, which introduces them to material they will cover in greater depth in their later years.
It’s one of the innovative programs that helped earn him his latest teaching recognition as one of 10 3M National Teaching Fellows in Canada.
Developing these close connections is important to Baljit, who regards his students as colleagues and believes in fostering good working relationships with the college and graduates of the future.
“They’ll never feel connected to the place of teaching if they are not looked after well,” he said.
Baljit also counsels first-year students in his faculty-in-residence position and lives in an apartment on campus.
He grew up a farmer’s son in India’s Punjab region so has special empathy for students new to city life.
“I can see Saskatchewan through the eyes of a farmer and relate to the young people from the country coming to the big university,” said Baljit, who has studied veterinary medicine in Canada, India and the United States.
Remembering his own early struggles, he said students in a slump need support.
“If you provide support and work with them, they will be back on track again.”
The novel program, which includes a residence lecture series and peer tutoring, has meant a unique lifestyle for Baljit, his wife Sarbjit and four year old son Pahul.
Later this year, he will drop his faculty-in-residence work after eight years and move to a home just off campus. Baljit hopes it will give him more time for family, and a new dog or two for his son, in addition to time for volunteering, reading, travelling and exercise.
He said needing only four to five hours of sleep each night allows him to maintain a busy schedule that includes research that focuses on respiratory diseases like shipping fever in cattle, teaching anatomy, sitting on a panel reviewing other veterinary colleges and chairing the graduate studies committee for the college’s department of biomedical sciences.
“I like to be very busy,” Baljit said.
His accomplishments were so numerous that department head Barry Blakley had trouble documenting them all within the 50-page limit for the 3M teaching nomination.
“You’d be hard pressed to come up with something he hasn’t done,” Blakley said, citing his excellence in both research and teaching and his receipt of the university’s highest teaching award, the master teacher award.
He called the outgoing, infectious Singh a dynamic and enthusiastic lecturer who makes anatomy, one of the students’ driest and least liked courses, relevant.
“He can put a spin on it that gets everybody excited about it,” he said.
Baljit led the charge to get biomedical rounds into the new curriculum, seeing its value in linking basic science with real life cases, said Blakley.
He also developed a video lecture series for graduate students to allow those in smaller colleges to benefit from the expertise and research at other colleges.
“He has done a number of things in teaching beyond the lecture theatre that many never do or never think of doing,” said Blakley.
