Students

The interdisciplinary studies program has allowed Alvin Singh to customize his education. His program is centered on three core components: political science, international development, and policy studies. “A specialized education doesn’t always give you the skills necessary to function properly in a flexible work environment. More and more I’m finding that the jobs I’m attracted to — jobs that a lot of young people are attracted to — are extremely flexible.”

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today, a film documenting the responses of nine students to intentional and unintentional occurrences of racism.

Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault say their video project began as a vent session in a course they were taking with First Nations Studies Professor Linc Kesler.

“We would start the class by telling stories about classes we were in,” relates Crey, a recent graduate of the program.

The stories, she adds, were a way of dealing with some of the offensive and ignorant statements they had heard about Aboriginal people — not on the street, but right in their classes at UBC.

“They were kind of funny, they were, of course, kind of absurd,” Crey says of the remarks of some UBC students and professors.

The statements were profoundly hurtful, often for no other reason than the fact that non-Aboriginal students sometimes forget that in talking about the historic challenges faced by Canada’s First Nations, they are talking about issues that Aboriginal students among them have experienced themselves.

Noting a pattern, Kesler observed that it would be a good idea to gather the stories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students alike.

That suggestion lit a fire under Crey and Perreault — both senior undergraduate students at the time. They were highly interested in developing a resource that would help fellow students and faculty discuss sensitive inter-cultural issues without hurting, or alienating people.

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Crey and Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today.

Video, they discovered, was a perfect medium, especially for getting uncomfortable first-person experiences out in the open.

They’ve screened a preliminary version of the video at several forums, including UBC’s Realities of Race conference in March 2007. In each case, audience members have been struck by the honesty of the students, who express their stories in their own words.

“You read a report, you can look at statistics, but actually being faced with students at UBC right now who are experiencing these things is pretty powerful.”

Dara Kelly is one Aboriginal student interviewed in the film. A member of the Fraser Valley Le’qa:mel First Nation, Kelly was in an English class with a focus on Aboriginal authors last year when one student prefaced a group discussion by asking why Aboriginal people were so “screwed up.”

For Kelly, that comment felt like a slap in the face, and in the film she candidly discusses why she finds the remark totally unacceptable.

“At the same time, when that kind of incident happens, it’s almost so shocking, or unbelievable, or hurtful that nobody says anything, and nobody knows what to do,” she says.

That’s one of the reasons Crey and Perreault created the video in the first place — the aim is to talk about these discussions, and to acknowledge that these aren’t just difficult for Aboriginal students.

People may recognize that something is racist, or insensitive, but not know what to do, or say, underscore Crey and Perreault.

Crey and Perreault say they intend to widen the scope of the project and add more interviews, as well as related classroom material, to accompany the film.

With the broad goal of removing an institutional barrier to Aboriginal post-secondary education, they plan on crafting their project to make it a resource for teachers at UBC and other institutions, something relevant to larger, multi-ethnic audiences.

“This video is here and it’s available,” Perreault says, “so let’s start talking about it instead of not talking about it, or talking about it in the hallway after class.”

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By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

The artist’s nickname is “Crabby Tanabe,” and despite his daunting reputation, Alexandra Chu wanted to interview him.

When Takao Tanabe finally called, the 80-year-old Governor General award-winning landscape artist wanted to know exactly what the UBC student knew about visual arts to write an article about it.

Chu, who graduated in May 2006 with a BA in English literature and minor in history, admits she didn’t know much, but she loved the artist’s work and, more importantly, she could write.

Chu considered her profile on Tanabe, which appeared in Ricepaper, the Vancouver-based magazine focusing on Asian Canadian arts and culture, as one of her favourites.

Other profiles she has written include Whistler’s own National Alpine ski racer and Olympic hopeful, Britt Janyk, and illustrator Marcos Chin, the artist behind the “look” of online dating giant, Lavalife.

“Anyone who does reporting, you feel so proud when you have your name out there,” Chu says. “You can google yourself and things come up.”

You could say Chu is building her future one word at time. Literally.

Chu was the recipient of the first-ever UBC Arts Co-op Student of the Year Award, a recognition she received after spending a term writing for FrontCounter BC, a one-stop shop for natural resource businesses wishing to obtain required paperwork.

From the pilot office in Kamloops, BC, Chu assisted in setting up nine other locations throughout the province. She developed content and layout for the agency’s website, created marketing brochures, and produced an online newsletter that caught the eye of an assistant Deputy Minister.

Impressed by the quality and language of Chu’s work, the agency continued publishing the newsletter past its scheduled end date of December 2006.

“She’s a good example of a student who really understood that career development is not something that happens overnight,” says Julie Walchli, founding director of the UBC Arts Co-op Education Program.

“So step-by-step, co-op term by co-op term, and freelance writing assignment by freelance writing assignment, she built a very impressive portfolio and is now graduating with a lot of experience under her belt and a lot of contacts.”

Chu got her big break at the Whistler Museum and Archives, her first co-op work term in 2004. Asked to do an independent research project to contribute to the museum’s records, Chu profiled the movers and shakers of the famed mountain resort community.

“I’d never interviewed, I didn’t know how it would go. I didn’t know if I’d follow the questions I’d set out, or if I’d talk freely,” Chu recalls.

“A few months later, the curator sent me an e-mail and she wanted to use parts of my project for a feature article that was on the cover of the news magazine The Pique for women’s history month.”

When the article appeared, the curator had written an introduction and a conclusion, but the rest was all Chu’s work. “And so that was my start,” she says.

From her first publication at Whistler to writing articles for the Faculty of Arts’ newsletter and website, to being the visual arts editor at Ricepaper, to helping launch FrontCounter BC, the judging committee was impressed, says Walchli.

“A lot of students in Arts want to be journalists, or professional writers in some way, and often it’s hard for them to know how to get started in that career,” Walchli says. “And Alexandra knew that each of her co-op terms and the things she did outside of co-op were building blocks to that ultimate goal.”

Chu’s spot on the Dean’s List during every term at UBC and her onerous role as the editor of the UBC Arts Co-op student newsletter were a some of the many reasons that set her apart from other award candidates, adds Walchli.

From having career goals of wanting to write for a living to interviewing prominent people, Chu has built a hefty portfolio.

“It’s been really exciting because [Ricepaper] is nationally published, and it’s nice to know that someone in Toronto might be reading your work,” says Chu of her feature articles.

Chu acknowledges she was intimidated by the prospect of interviewing Tanabe, but she was in for a surprise after his unexpected call, which produced a personal invitation to his retrospective exhibition.

“He was just so nice. He was the kindest person,” she recalls. “He talked — he was really candid. I love meeting people like that. And some articles, they just come. You just write them, they’re there.”

Today, Chu is the assistant director of marketing and client services at Canadian Education Centre Network, a non-profit company aiming to promote Canada as a study destination for international students. She is one of roughly 2,000 students graduating with an Arts degree this year.

Not bad for a girl who didn’t know what she wanted to do with her English degree. But after four co-op terms at UBC, Chu thinks of her degree as a valuable learning opportunity, helping her to develop her career.

“It’s been about finding what I could do with my English major,” she says.

“At first, with English literature, it seemed like there was not a lot to do,” recalls Chu. “But I think of my writing skills and my research skills as traits. And a lot of people don’t think of it that way, but I think of them as traits that I’ve developed because people commission me to write articles and pay me.”

Chu considers the network of contacts she has built to be invaluable.

“The people you meet are just as important as the jobs you do because you’ll meet people who will be really supportive, who will be references for you to get a career when you graduate, who will help you find other things you’re interested in,” Chu says.

“Like in Whistler, I was really interested in writing. They let me go with it. They helped me to make it something more than just a book in the museum that people may or may not look at.”

Chu, who spent the other co-op terms writing and researching for the Dean of Arts office, the Richmond Museum, and the Whistler Museum and Archives, credits her UBC degree for providing her with transferable skills.

“One of the things in Arts is thinking outside the box. You may not graduate with something like an accountant where you have a specific job, but you have these skills to do anything,” she adds.

“I have a wealth of experience working with children, working as a writer and reporter, working on websites, working with customers in museums, communicating through all sorts of avenues.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

Ask Christiane McInnes about her most bizarre experience as an Arts Co-op and she’ll tell you it was her very first term.

An art history major working toward a minor in 19^th century studies, McInnes lept at the chance to act as a British emigré from her favorite century for a theatre show called Storyeum.

For four months one summer in 2005, McInnes donned a costume consisting of “layers and layers” of cotton petticoats, corsets, skirts, gloves and hats, assume the requisite British accent, and traipse around Vancouver’s historic Gastown district, enticing tourists to come see the show.

“One thing I find most funny to think about in retrospect is how many family albums I’m in across the world, because my photograph was taken a million, million times,” McInnes says.

“But it was a lot of fun.”

As much as she enjoyed that summer, McInnes says her co-op experiences have helped toward what she wants to do after university.

This past summer, she finished her fourth and final placement with Vancouver’s Atira Women’s Resource Society, an experience she says cemented her decision to choose professional fundraising as her career.

“I’m really loving it,” she says of her job as writer of grant proposals. Much of her responsibilities had to do with winning funding for Atira, a non-profit that offers support, advocacy, and housing for women and children who have been victims of violence.

“I like the thought that some of these grant proposals will be successful and my work will have supported Atira in some endeavour.”

Aside from Storyeum and Atira, McInnes also spent two back-to-back placements as a research assistant with Arts Academic Advising.

There, she helped develop a pilot program called Peer Academic Coaching, an initiative that identified struggling students on academic probation and paired them with senior students, all in the interest of getting them off probation and pursuing their own personal and academic goals. The program eventually developed into a program that matched senior students with all incoming international students to the Faculty of Arts.

There’s no doubt in McInnes’s mind, Co-op is well worth the time and energy.

“It’s the only kind of program you can do where you gain skills over four months, get a really great reference — hopefully — and then, by the time you’re finished your degree, you have 16 months of work experience under your belt.”

In addition to volunteering and coordinating The Vagina Monologues at UBC in 2005 and 2006, McInnes was also the president of the Arts Co-op Students’ Association in 2006-07.

She says she is a true believer in the power of going out there and getting your hands dirty to strike a balance with what you learn in class.

“Not only does it help you become more employable, it helps you figure out what you want to do and where you want to go — and you’re doing all this while studying and earning money.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

Bobby Huang first learned about First Nations culture in a Grade 6 classroom. His school had arranged for speakers from Aboriginal communities to present to his class and Bobby remembers how fascinated he was to hear a different perspective on Canada’s history.

“It’s so interesting and important, particularly because it’s a side of Canadian history that we rarely hear about,” says Bobby. “It’s also not the proudest moment in our history but I feel that it’s important that as Canadians, we are informed about the stories of other Canadians.”

Since then, Bobby has held an interest in Canada’s historic relationship with Aboriginal peoples and what can be done to move towards a stronger relationship with the First Nations of Canada. This interest encouraged him to take a seminar on Native History in his third year as a political science student at UBC.

It also led him to his first work term as an Arts Co-op student to Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada (IRSRC), a federal department dedicated to strengthening partnerships within government and with Aboriginal people and other citizens to address and resolve issues arising from the legacy of Indian residential schools.

As a Litigation Information Analyst, Bobby’s current work at IRSRC involves managing dispute resolution claims filed by former residential school students. Bobby reviews their claims and prepares their cases for a hearing before an independent decision maker and a government representative.

Dealing with the cases of claimants is not always easy. They often involve stories of mistreatment, neglect, and abuse. However, Bobby says, “it is both humbling and inspiring to hear about individuals who have overcome so much adversity in their lives.”

“The most rewarding aspect of my job is the fact that I’m doing a small part to make a difference in other people’s lives,” says Bobby, “There’s a common stereotype that government workers do very little besides pushing paper, but having spent two work terms at a federal department, I have seen first hand that many individuals working in the public service care deeply and are very passionate about their work.”

For Bobby, the Arts Co-op Program has helped him build a career out of his interests. “It’s easy to know what you might want to do,” he explains, “Co-op helped me figure out the steps I needed to take to reach my career goals. Things like networking, being patient, managing expectations, and taking the time to explore career options to find out your likes as well as your dislikes are all valuable lessons I picked up from co-op.”

At IRSRC, Bobby works in what is described as a “sunset department,” a department that will ultimately close when its mandate has been fulfilled. Ironically, this means that if Bobby is successful at his job, he will also be out of a job. This does not sway Bobby, however, as he is confident that his co-op experiences have given him the knowledge, skills, and confidence to find other meaningful work opportunities.

“Within government, there is a broad spectrum of opportunities, particularly for Arts graduates, and there are so many departments and agencies that there’s bound to be something that suits your interest,” he says. “I had never seriously considered a career in the public service but my two work terms at IRSRC have opened my eyes to a potential career path.”

Bobby also serves as co-chair of the Arts Co-op Students’ Association Publishing Team, which publishes the tri-annual co-op online newsletter "arts at work."

By Carmen Chu (BA, 2008, Psychology and English Literature). Carmen is an Arts Co-op student.