First Year Students

Nasteha Omar, who wants to study orthopedics, spent a high school semester at U of T Mississauga via the Support, Engage, Experience (SEE) UTM program

Nasteha Omar has long been interested in becoming an orthopedic surgeon – and thanks to a unique program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the first-year student is already well on her way.

“I’ve had to go to hospital and be in contact with different orthopedic surgeons lots of times because of problems that I have myself,” she says. “And I found their careers really interesting from a young age. It’s just something that I’ve always wanted to do.”

While taking the first steps towards her goal at U of T Mississauga was always her intention – her family lives near the campus and her older sister is already a student – Omar got an early and up-close look at university life via the Support, Engage, Experience U of T Mississauga (SEE UTM) initiative, which invites Peel District high school students to spend a semester at U of T Mississauga to get a taste of post-secondary education.

It was nothing short of “a transformative experience,” says Omar, who was encouraged to apply for the initiative by her vice-principal at Erindale Secondary School. “It wasn’t only a chance to connect with peers and mentors, but also an opportunity to engage in programs that helped me enrich my academic and personal growth.”

Now a first-year student, Omar is pursuing an honours bachelor of science degree in life sciences and eyeing a specialist in molecular biology.

She says her SEE UTM experience allowed her to explore the sciences from a variety of lenses. One of the highlights was taking a course, "STEM in Society," that explores how the STEM fields intersect with society, culture and politics.

“I’ve always been interested in the sciences and STEM, so participating in a course that was more about the ethical side of ongoing situations in our world – and of science topics – really opened my eyes to different pathways that I want to explore,” Omar says of the course taught by Sheliza Ibrahim, an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

In addition to exploring new intellectual ground, Omar also got a taste of hands-on scientific research in the Applied Perception & Psychophysics Laboratory, co-directed by Assistant Professors Anna Kosovicheva and Benjamin Wolfe of the department of psychology. There, Omar used MATLAB programming software to design an experiment to study how visual and auditory stimuli interact. “It was to show how our perception of time can be influenced by how we interpret events,” she says.

While Omar didn’t have time to test the experiment before her semester ended, she plans to do more lab work as an undergraduate student, picking up where she left off.

Alongside her SEE UTM experience, Omar also gained insight into U of T Mississauga's myriad resources and supports via the Black Access to Educational Excellence initiative (BAEE@UTM), which organizes events and networking opportunities aimed at helping Black high school students learn more about the campus community – and thrive once they get there.

For Omar, that means looking beyond her academic goals. She plans to get involved in student clubs, particularly anything that caters to her love of literature – she writes poems and fiction, and took part in the Caribbean & Black Writing Collective during her semester at the university. And she wants to start a non-profit tutoring organization by building on her high school experience founding the Erindale Secondary School chapter of Learn To Be, an NGO that provides free online tutoring.

“It was a great opportunity for students to not only gain volunteer hours but make connections with other students in an online tutoring format, where they tutored students from under-privileged families that wouldn’t be able to get extra help or access to educational resources outside of school,” she says. “I’d love to see it up and running at UTM if that would be a possibility.”

Omar remains in touch with some of her peers from the SEE UTM and BAEE@UTM programs, as well as the upper-year U of T Mississauga students who served as mentors.

“I feel like we were all able to grow really close as a community,” she says. “It helped me find my footing for what was to come when I enter university, so it was really amazing.”

Singing karaoke, designing flash mobs: U of T's Denise Cruz engages first-year students

ullahnor — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 20:00:20 +0000

Singing karaoke, designing flash mobs: U of T's Denise Cruz engages first-year students

ullahnor Mon, 01/30/2017 - 15:00

Cutline

Denise Cruz: “The humanities allow you to imagine alternate worlds, and what it might be like to think, act or live in those worlds. They encourage critical thinking and lead toward an ethical way of being with each other” (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Elaine Smith

Author legacy

Elaine Smith

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Undergraduate Education

First Year Students

The literature of the Asian diaspora would have lost a major champion if Denise Cruz had followed her initial plan to attend medical school.

Luckily, Cruz, an associate professor in U of T's English department, couldn't walk away from literature.

Today, her class for first-year students in the Faculty of Arts & Science includes Canadian writers from diverse backgrounds such as Mona Awad, David Chariandy and Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Literature, she says, plays an important role in teaching critical thinking and reflection, something she emphasizes when teaching “Literature of Our Time.”

For Cruz, the 400-student humanities course, which was previously taught by Professor Nick Mount, is an argument for why the acts of critical reading and writing are crucial in today’s world where we read things on social media – without context –and make snap judgments on whether to “like” or “not like.”

“This is why I don’t just analyze the texts and provide historical and cultural context. My students and I have sung karaoke together to demonstrate anonymity within a crowd, designed musical flash mobs to synthesize skills for the final exam and played a 400-student version of the game “telephone” to examine the multiple narrators of a book like Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”

She says she looks for ways to engage students with the global world.

“What I try to bring is a direct engagement with the transnational and the global,” Cruz says. “Students are able to read works that are not similar to their experiences.

“The humanities allow you to imagine alternate worlds, and what it might be like to think, act or live in those worlds. They encourage critical thinking and lead toward an ethical way of being with each other.”

Cruz’s research also challenges people to think about the world – both past and present – in new ways. She calls herself “a scholar of gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures.”

“I’m interested in national, regional and global interactions in North America, the Philippines and Asia, and how these dynamics effect gender and sexuality,” she says.

“More broadly, my work is grounded in my fascination with examining how different forms of culture – a novel, a performance, a fashion show – can become a way of questioning lived social realities.”

The California native pursued her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, and arrived at the University of Toronto in 2013 after six years teaching at Indiana University.

“The University of Toronto was attractive for many reasons,” Cruz says. “It’s a wonderful school and I was impressed by the strength of the English department. It has a lot of depth in gender and sexuality studies and in post-colonial studies, two of my major interests.”

Cruz, the daughter of Filipino immigrants to the United States, was also attracted by Toronto’s large Filipino community.

“Toronto’s place as a global city interested me, and I like the idea of studying American literature outside the United States. It has been wonderful.”

She is currently working on a book about fashion, Runways: Filipino Couture and the New Silk Road.

“Manila (the capital of the Philippines) has a long history of made-to-order, custom clothing – couture,” Cruz says. “There are more than 300 working designers there today, and the book looks at the city from the Second World War to the present.

“These designers defy the stereotype of cheaply made Philippine clothing, highlight the importance of the industry and show its connections with centres like Dubai, rather than the traditional fashion centre, Paris.”