Our two newly appointed Deans of Studies, Magnus Løberg og Eli Feiring, are committed to seeing and listening to students and meeting their needs. If you missed their appeal to students during the election campaign, you can watch the video here. Below you can read their first management column, in which they introduce themselves and provide their thoughts on the work ahead.
Magnus Løberg, Pro-Dean of Studies
I am looking forward to working with all of the talented teachers at the Faculty, the administrative employees and the students to deliver outstanding programmes. I am particularly happy to see students supporting the new Office of the Dean. Together, we will ensure that students can develop into confident professionals and social actors, or in other words, the sort of people we would want as our colleagues in the future. We are fortunate to have a fantastic starting point. We recruit talented and reflective students for our programmes and we help shape the professionals for which there is high demand in the job market.
I am a qualified doctor and I have taught the subject “Knowledge management, leadership and quality enhancement” to medical students for a number of years. Many students will undoubtedly draw parallels between the tools we will use in the Office of the Dean (highlight, involve and collaborate, decide, implement and evaluate) and how they work on their knowledge management, leadership and quality enhancement tasks. I would also like for those of us in the Office of the Dean to be good role models for students in terms of learning and development.
There is a lot of excellent development work taking place at the Faculty in relation to the study programs we offer. Two examples:
This autumn, we will launch the first decentralised campus for medical studies - University of Oslo Campus South. We are confident that this will be an excellent offering for students and an important boost for the Faculty of Medicine and the Agder region.
Our teachers and academic communities are passionate about ensuring that medical students are well equipped to work as doctors in the future. One way in which they contribute to this is by developing outstanding electronic learning resources that are used both in organised teaching and independently by students. This is extremely valuable and an example of the sort of activities the Office of the Dean will focus on.
This spring, we will also launch introductory seminars for new teachers at the Faculty. We know that many people are unsure about both the practical and educational aspects of what it means to work at the University and to train new colleagues. As part of this, we will showcase some specific tips and tricks for how to ensure that the course is both engaging and educational! I look forward to striving to achieve excellence in education at the Faculty of Medicine.
Eli Feiring, Vice-Dean of Studies
Did you know that more than 700 students at the Faculty of Medicine study subjects such as nutrition, public health and epidemiology, health economics, administration and management, health policy, medical sociology, anthropology and history, international and global health and medical ethics?
In short: We offer exciting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study programmes at the Faculty. As a new Vice-Dean of Studies, the eight bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes we offer fall within my area of responsibility. I look forward to further developing the many excellent programmes we offer locally, but also our international focus.
I have a PhD in political science and my fields include social economics, ethics and political philosophy and I am also a Professor of Health Policy and Medical Ethics. My role at the Department of Health and Society (HELSAM) taught me just how important – and challenging – it is to understand medicine, health and health services from different academic perspectives. I have no doubt that insights from the humanities and social sciences contribute to increasingly widespread knowledge of medicine and health. Students at the Faculty require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise in order to investigate, understand and contribute to solving everything from the major questions relating to how we will meet global challenges to the specific challenges of organising teams in the workplace. I look forward to working together with students, the administrative employees and our teachers to deliver outstanding bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes at the Faculty of Medicine.