2022 WICTO Symposium: Connecting Through Chemistry
On November 19th, 2022, WICTO hosted its inaugural professional development symposium titled “Connecting Through Chemistry” in Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories. More than 70 participants, including undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs from the Chemistry department across all three campuses (St. George, UTM, and UTSC) participated in the event.
The day was filled with a variety of workshops, panels, and networking opportunities. Our first workshop, titled “Building a Sense of Belonging,” led by WICTO executives Abbey Clapperton and Alex Gabbey, took the participants through discussion-based activities to think of strategies that promote a sense of belonging within the Chemistry Department at UofT. The journal article titled “Facilitating Discussions of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion through an Open Conversational Format: Graduate Students’ Perspectives” published in the Journal of Chemical Education* was used in this workshop to brainstorm strategies that promote equity, diversity and inclusion to employ within our own chemistry community.
In addition, we offered a “How to Prep for Graduate School” panel targeted to the undergraduate attendees. Stephanie Sebastiampillai and Elyse Hudson moderated a Q&A session which featured a panel of graduate students/ postdocs (Tianjia Yang, Soha Ahmadi, Jiaqi Gong, Daniel Ou, and Rees Hughes) in the chemistry department. These panelists provided information on the benefits and opportunities that graduate school offers, as well as tips and advice on applying.
In the afternoon session, graduate students were invited to participate in “Graduate Student Flash Talks”, a 3-minute thesis style competition, organized by Harry Mills, Valeria Morozova, and Taylor Wu. Current graduate students gave short presentations about their research targeted to a general chemistry audience. Presenters include Alina Trofimova, Ella Rajaonson, Kirsten Yeh, Richard Fuku, Temi Ajayi, Atzin San Roman, and Isla Wrightson. The audience, along with two chemistry alumni (Elizabeth Prince and Ehsen Tayyabi), adjudicated the talks, with prizes awarded to Kirsten Yeh (first place), Isla Wrightson (second place), and Ella Rajaonson (third place). We congratulate all presenters on their excellent talks!
Our final panel of the day was our “Alumni Career Panel'' which featured 8 recent graduates from the Department of Chemistry at UofT: Ehsen Tayyabi (PhD ‘22), Elizabeth Prince (PhD ‘21), Diya Zhu (PhD ‘21), Charis Lam (MSc ‘20), Christopher Dixon (PhD ‘20), Claudia Alvarez (PhD ‘18), Katie Badali (MSc ‘14), and Leo Mui (MSc ‘10). Each panelist gave a brief introduction about themselves, what they did for the graduate research, and spoke about their career trajectories. The audience participated in an active Q&A session where panelists answered questions about their careers, interview processes, work/life balance, and networking. To end our event, alumni and all participants engaged in a networking session, where food and mocktails were served.
WICTO is grateful to the Student Initiative Fund, the Faculty of Arts & Science Milestones & Pathways grant, and the Department of Chemistry for their support in funding our event. We would also like to extend a warm thank-you to all attendees and alumni who took part in this event. We look forward to offering this event for years to come!
Written by Alicia Battaglia & Azalea Uva
*Link for article: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00407
