Five to watch: Convocation 2014's global citizens

More than 12,500 students are expected to cross the stage at Convocation Hall this June, receive their hard-won undergraduate or graduate degrees, and join the ranks of the University of Toronto's more than half a million alumni around the world. 

That's more than 12,500 unique stories of dedication, struggle, creativity and triumph to celebrate - from those who held part-time or even full-time jobs while studying, to those who juggled family and volunteer responsibilities, launched their own companies, or published leading research.

While most of those stories will only be shared among family, friends, classmates and mentors, U of T News asked faculty and staff for their suggestions of grads who are global citizens, health leaders, community builders, entrepreneurs, education leaders and city builders to watch in the years to come.

Below, writer Terry Lavender shares some of the stories of U of T's global citizens.

Sofia Ijaz (Law)
“Sitting next to me, an excited sister whispered loudly to her brother, past guards sitting between them, that she found the perfect girl for him, and a new bride mouthed to her recently arrested husband that she was pregnant. The flashes of news from their life outside made the prisoners smile and laugh – even amidst the graveness of the situation before them.”

Sofia Ijaz’s passion for human rights comes through strongly in that paragraph – the conclusion to a report on her experience working with Addameer, a prisoners’ rights organization in Palestine as part of the U of T Law International Human Rights Program (IHRP). Ijaz, who graduates this year with her Juris Doctor, was describing how Palestinian detainees are rarely able to see their families outside of the military courtroom where the NGO worked.

Ijaz says her passion for justice and human rights arises in part from her own family’s experiences. Her grandfather came from a persecuted minority Islamic sect in Pakistan.

“I always grew up with that consciousness and that desire to do something about it because I have the privilege of being here, I have the privilege of a first-class Canadian education, and I've always wanted to use that to do something for people who are in similar situations who are facing abuses, who are facing human rights violations.”

Besides her experience in Palestine, Ijaz has spent time in Syria, co-edited the IHRP Rights Review news magazine, worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Criminal Court, and acted as a mentor to low-income students in the Law School’s LSAT preparatory program.

And she’s not planning to slow down. This summer she’ll be articling with a Toronto law firm that specializes in human rights and union-side labour law, and after that, she’ll continue to fight for human rights and social justice. “It’s my life mandate.”

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Sneha Kukreja (UTM, Commerce)
New Delhi is 11,655 kilometres away from Mississauga, but there’s a huge cultural distance too, as Sneha Kukreja discovered when she came to University of Toronto Mississauga to study commerce four years ago.

Kukreja was determined to go to university abroad to fulfil her father’s dream. Her father, a successful New Delhi businessman, was not able to get a university degree himself, but he was determined that his daughter and her two younger siblings would do so.

“It was a huge culture shock, coming to Canada,” she recalls. “I didn't have many friends, I was just one week into Canada and I then I had to go to this event called Biz Frosh. I'd never been out at night, so I was really intimidated by everything and I was just in my room and thinking, "I'm stuck here, I don't know what to do."

Eventually, Kukreja came out of her bubble, as she describes it, by getting involved in extracurricular activities. She joined the Hindu Student Council and slowly started meeting people, first from her own culture and then from other backgrounds. “That's what helped me kind of get into this culture. I met some amazing people.”

Kukreja ended up as president of the Hindu Student Council, one of UTM’s largest student groups. Among her accomplishments in that role was organizing a Diwali celebration. Heather Hines of the UTM Department of Management describes how Kukreja “calmly managed a cultural show and dinner with well over 600 attendees.”

Completely at home in Canada now, Kukreja hopes to get a job in finance here, and perhaps go for a graduate degree in a few years. “This is my home now.”

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Wade Sahni (Rotman)
George Mallory may have wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there,” but Rotman MBA graduate Wade Sahni had a more humanitarian reason for ascending Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro last month. He was raising money and awareness for Kilimanjaro Young Girls In Need (KYGN).

Founded in 2007, KYGN has built a nursery school in Mabogini, a small village near Kilimanjaro to educate girls for pre-primary education and to create academic sponsorships to get girls into primary school. KYGN believes that all young girls have the right to a safe, stable, and nurturing environment with emotional support, education, and medical care, Sahni said in a phone call from Mabogini a few days after the climb.

Sahni, who has been climbing since he was nine years old, started training for the climb about two months before the ascent, which he made along with Rotman classmate Deep Grewall. Immediately after he came down, he started working at the KYGN school, “painting the new building, working with the children, teaching them their numbers and playing with them and just trying to create a positive environment for them in which to grow. It’s been an amazing experience,” he said, to the sound of children’s laughter in the background. “They have almost nothing except for families that love them. But they’re happy, they’re positive and they’re immensely curious about you.”

Besides his physical work with the school, Sahni has also raised more than $2,000 through his climb for KYGN. He says he made the contribution in honour of his aunt, Lakshima. “She was an incredible influence in my life, and was not only an incredibly successful businesswoman in a man's world, but a loving and caring mother and aunt. She was an inspiring example of what women can be if they have access to the right resources, and education.”

Sahni will be helping out at the school in Mabogini until August, although he’s hoping to make it back for Convocation on June 20. On August 1 he starts working for the Promontory Financial Group in Toronto. But his connections with KYGN won’t end – he’ll be working on getting it Canadian charitable status, and would like to come back to Mabogini to help on the ground in the future. And he’s not done climbing yet either. “I’d love to climb other peaks; maybe Mount Blanc in Europe.”

For more information about KYGN, go to http://wade-sahni.squarespace.com/

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Gabilan Sivapatham (Arts & Science)
The slogan “Think globally, act locally” could have been coined especially for Gabilan Sivapatham. Born and raised in Toronto’s St. James Town neighbourhood, Sivapatham is applying what he learned in the Life Sciences’ global health option to helping his own community.

Sivapatham has been active in St. James Town since Grade 10. He was one of the founding members of the St. James Town Youth Council, where he helped establish an annual talent show, a community awards program, and grew advocacy for the revitalization of a local tennis court. He received a Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award this year for his efforts. As part of the global health option in the life sciences program, he has travelled to Hong Kong - where he studied herbal medicine and non-toxic cancer treatment - and Sri Lanka, where he shadowed a local doctor.

His experiences both in the life sciences program and as a community activist have taught him that the solutions for a community have to come from within.

“Development dialogue used to assume that one size fits all. But something that we've encountered over and over in the global health option is that that definitely doesn't work. In my case, this was very clear in the St. James Town community, one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the country.”

Sivapatham isn’t interested in what he calls “voluntourism” – "this concept of students in the Global North visiting poor communities, spending a few days building schools or dispensing aid and taking part in projects that really don’t focus on sustainable change. “We need to revisit and redefine the idea that we in the Global North can save the world when, in fact, we should probably do a bit more research into where we're going, why we're going and what kind of impact we're going to have. Instead, we can start by looking in our own backyards, consider how our livelihoods are affecting others in the Global South, and additionally tackle development issues here as well.”

Currently studying for his MCATs, Sivapatham hopes to be accepted into medical school. His ultimate interest is in public health policy development and systems development, but is eager to take whatever opportunities arise.

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Betty Xie (Arts and Science)
When Betty Xie and her small film crew of U of T students travelled to Taiwan in 2012 to make an election documentary, they thought the politics would be simple – voters who identified as Chinese would support the Koumingtang, voters who identified as Taiwanese would support the Democratic Progressive Party.

However, Xie discovered that things weren’t quite that simple. Through interviews with scholars, students, and voters they realized that there was a wide spectrum of opinions that fell between the two extremes, revealing the complexity of cross-strait relations.

The documentary that she produced, Untag Taiwan, has received critical acclaim, and Xie, who grew up in Richmond, BC before coming to U of T to take a double major in Cinema Studies and Asia Pacific Studies, is now working on a second film. While set in Taiwan again, her new project is not about politics.

“It’s called The Home Promised,” she says, “and it is a documentary about a small neighbourhood on the brink of demolition in Taipei city. Our crew is made up of current U of T students and new grads. We expect to finish the film by the end of the summer and catch on a film festival ride.”

After convocation, Xie will be joining the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival's programming committee. She says she wants to continue to work in the film industry, but not necessarily making documentaries.