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Mentoring graduate students is very challenging, even when both the student and faculty have similar cultural values. Many international students have a different culture from that of Canadian. Their challenge is adapting to their new environment, and for their faculty advisors to understand and work well with them. This research explored the relationships, experience, and challenges of international graduate students and their faculty advisors at the University of Guelph, through focus group discussions, semi-structured face-to-face interviews and online surveys. Language barriers and financial difficulties were among the major challenges international students face adapting to their academic and social environment and working with their faculty advisors. We found that building good student-advisor relationship requires understanding graduate student and advisor formal responsibilities and expectations. Le mentorat des étudiants de cycles supérieurs pose tout un défi, même dans les cas où l’étudiant et le professeur ont tous deux des valeurs culturelles semblables. De nombreux étudiants internationaux viennent d’une culture différente de ce que nous connaissons au Canada. Leur défi est de s’adapter à leur nouvel environnement et pour leurs conseillers pédagogiques, de les comprendre et de collaborer avec eux. Cette recherche explore les relations de travail, l’expérience et les défis auxquels sont confrontés les étudiants internationaux de cycles supérieurs et leurs conseillers pédagogiques à l’Université de Guelph par le biais de discussions de groupes de consultation, d’entrevues face à face semi-structurées et d’un sondage en ligne. Les barrières linguistiques et les difficultés financières s’avèrent comme étant les défis principaux auxquels font face les étudiants internationaux lors de leur adaptation à leur environnement académique et social et dans leurs interactions avec leurs conseillers pédagogiques. Nous avons constaté que pour établir de bonnes relations étudiant-conseiller pédagogique, il est essentiel de comprendre les responsabilités et les attentes formelles des étudiants et des conseillers pédagogiques.

City greenbelts or greenways are usually created to achieve multiple goals, often including conservation of agricultural or range land, preservation of unique environments and heritage, recreation, and creation of transportation and utility corridors. Tradeoffs may be required in meeting these multiple goals. Analysis of potential future trajectories for urban development with such greenbelts is important to characterize the drivers and spatially explicit patterns of change that may ensue. Spatially explicit multi-criteria analysis provides one approach for examination of driver and patterns. In this paper, we use a spatial multi-criteria analysis shell (MCAS-S) to explore two case studies: (1) a 1250 ha subset of the Toronto Greenbelt in the Durham region of Ontario (Canada); and (2) the Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan area for endangered species protection on the western side of Austin, Texas (USA). In both cases, urbanization and encroachment are major pressures. The study areas were described by GIS data layers grouped into themes that capture major competing factors-e.g., residential preference, physical constraints to development, agricultural and environmental assets, tourism, and infrastructure development. Rules were constructed that combined preference for access to green space with limits to development, and a range of scenario layers were created to indicate likely future development areas. Development in the Toronto Greenbelt was mostly associated with areas of low likelihood of development, probably because areas that met all requirements-limited impact on agriculture and environment but helpful for tourism and infrastructure-were difficult to find. By contrast, development in the Austin BCCP was associated with urban infill modified by proximity to preserves. Although the results are only associative and not causative, they illustrate the difficulties of satisfying multiple competing goals in greenbelts, and the tendency for preserved patches to be incrementally surrounded by development. [

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