Post-doctoral and PhD students showed their academic success extends beyond the classroom when presenting several community-oriented projects to Queen’s and Kingston leadership last month.
Six teams of PhD, post-docs, and professional students presented their findings at City Hall on May 2 as part of the culminating event of the PhD-Community Initiative program (PhD-CI), an initiative piloted at Queen’s in 2016.
Teams partnered with community organizations to address community-identified problems. Projects ranged from integrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into Kingston’s city planning to programming recommendations for Bangladeshi seniors to improve their health outcomes.
This year, teams partnered with the City of Kingston, United Way Kingston, the Bangladeshi Canadian Community Services, ABLE2, Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders Association, and Kingston Frontenac Lennox & Addington (KFL&A) Public Health.
One team, named “Team Impact,” partnered with ABLE 2, a community organization serving people with “exceptionalities,” including programs for individuals with fetal alcohol syndrome and other disabilities.
PhD students Sunaira Tejpar and Daniel Espiritu, and PhD candidates, Megan Wylie and Hiwot Abebe Mekuanent, surveyed ABLE 2’s impact on its .
“I believe [the word] exceptionalities is much better—people still use [the word] disabilities, and that’s okay. But with exceptionalities, you’re really leveraging [people’s] strengths,” Tejpar said in an interview with The Journal.
The group’s diversity of expertise and personal experiences equipped them to survey a sensitive population and provide insight on how ABLE 2’s programming impacted the lives of its s. The team were matched because they all ranked ABLE 2 as their top community partner. According to Tejpar, the group became a family.
“The main reason I had an interest in this research is I had a brother with intellectual disability,” Mekuanent said. “It was always within me. I need to do something to create a better world because I know the suffering and the challenge my brother went through.”
Team Impact found the PhD-CI to be a refreshing change from their usual academic programming. They believe their skills could be uniquely applied to have an impact on people, despite coming from traditional academic fields.
“The PhD-Community Initiative is not a typical academic endeavor. The students who participate in the program, they’re ionate about social change, they want to serve as changemakers,” Fahim Quadir, dean of graduate students and postdoctoral affairs, said in an interview with The Journal.
Collaboration between community partners and university students must be a two-way street, Qudair believes. PhD-CI is one of the ways the University is trying to bridge the gap between itself and local communities.
“We have to show our deep interest in working with community organizations or community groups. We belong here. That’s what we’re ionate about,” Quadir said. “We cannot build an island and create an identity of an ivory tower and maintain our isolation.”
To Quadir, the PhD-CI program’s success isn’t defined by numbers, but rather by how students, community partners, and the people they represent feel about the impact of the program’s projects. He hopes Queen’s students who participate in the program walk away with not only their degree, but as more responsible global citizens.
“I see myself as a student of development, and [development] is really about expanding human choices, giving people the option to be successful in their own territories,” Quadir said.
“One of the things we are ionate about is [restructuring education] to ensure every single individual has the opportunity to realize their full potential.”
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