Studying at St. Stephen's University During COVID-19

St. Stephen's University in Southwest New Brunswick is known as "Canada's smallest university." But it's much more than its famous tagline, insists Dr. Margaret Anne Smith, President of St. Stephen's University.

"I like to say we are the two circles that meet in the middle of a Venn diagram: one being 'university' and the other being 'community. We have all the attributes of a big university with the community aspects of a small group,'" says Smith. "I think we all learn better if we have personal interactions in a classroom and are accountable to each other." 

COVID-19 has posed challenges for the university, which normally sends students on education trips around the world during the school year. Those trips have been put on hold this year with a focus on classroom learning. While bigger universities have been forced to settle for online courses for the most during the pandemic, the small size of St. Stephen's University has made classroom-based courses still possible at Canada's smallest university in the smalltown of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. 12 students currently live on campus while a handful of others live within the community. 

"We've had to pull in our scope this year, which meant not traveling for educational purposes, but we didn't have to go fully online. I was worried that if we went online, we'd lose our students--that they might go to bigger schools where they've designed learning to be online. We've designed learning to be person-to-person, and so far it's worked out really well. We look forward to returning to normal, but we've learned a lot about what we value in this process."