Student Profile Irene

Outside-the-box courses

Studying programs in the social sciences, Irene has enjoyed finding the unique and fun courses examining society. One example was PSY220: Social Psychology, in which she learned about the psychology of love, why opposites don’t actually attract and why people interact the way they do with each other. She also enjoyed ANT345: Global Health and Anthropological Perspectives, studying how culture impacts health, through case studies like milk intolerance—did you know some people are lactose intolerant not because of a genetic mutation but because of a small group of Nordic people who kept drinking cow milk? The more you know.
  

Gaining hands-on experience

In her internship course working at an environmental policy firm, Irene wrote up reports on salt pollution, addressing policy impacts and alternatives to road salt to help protect animals. Through her work, she discovered that local rivers in the GTA were more than half sodium because of road salting in the winter, and she felt a sense of fulfilment in knowing that research would help to create policy to reduce this. Moreover, since this internship experience was through the Arts and Science Internship Program (ASIP), she was able to count it as an Anthropology course credit.
 

Adjusting to university

As an international student, Irene found herself adjusting to not only university life but also life in a new country. To ease this transition, she went out of her way to make friends with Canadians, attend free workshops, such as essay writing, made use of accessibility services to better her time management skills, and made friends with the people in the year above her to be able to get advice from those in a similar situation.