Author: Aysha Shamsuddin, IIS Coordinator, Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services
Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services (Access Alliance) convened its seventh IRSN meeting on January 15, 2020 from 5.30 pm to 8.30 pm at Kensington Gardens, Toronto. These quarterly networking events (meetings) are organized to support the professional success of Internationally Educated Researchers (IERs) and evaluators by promoting active peer support and providing them appropriate opportunities for career networking and professional development. Networking is key to professional success in Canadian job market and sensing its relevance, ever since its launch IRSN has provided career networking opportunity for its members. The gathering which witnessed participation of thirty two professionals began with a half an hour long networking session. The event also featured three Professional Development/Capacity Building sessions on Big Data, Resume Writing and Knowledge Translation.
Jasmine Thibault, Director, Community Programs of Access Alliance inaugurated the event with “Welcome and Introductions”. She highlighted the importance of peer support in making the activities of IRSN successful and thanked the IRSN volunteers, the IRSN team and the speakers for their efforts towards making this event successful. She pointed out that all the sessions in the event were of immense significance to the research community.
Dr. Fahad Razak, Scientist, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute delivered a session on ‘Using Big Data to Study Health Care Delivery’. His session focused on the challenges faced by the Canadian health care sector due to data deprivation and the role of big data in addressing these challenges. The event also featured a ‘Resume Writing’ workshop by Connel Valentine, Career Coach, Zero2Hire. Apart from providing some tips to write effective resumes, Connel also reviewed resumes of four IRSN members in this session. The gathering concluded with a Capacity Development Session on ‘Knowledge Translation’ by Amani Massoud, Immigrant Insight Scholar, Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services and Institute for Work and Health. Amani, who is currently managing the Knowledge Translation group in the web portal provided a brief overview of Knowledge Translation in her session
Ted Richmond, Advisor, IRSN moderated the sessions. In his concluding remarks, Ted requested the IRSN members to actively participate in the activities of the web portal. AKM Alamgir, Manager, Quality and Accountability Systems, Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services represented Community Based Research Team of Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services at the event.
And towards the culmination of this event, it was evident that IRSN members had handful of takeaways from the event. One of the participants, Ali Zargham Boroujeni, thanked the IRSN team for organizing this event and said that he learned about the concept of big data analysis and got some new insights on resume and cover letter writing from the event.
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