Tyler Saumur, Rehabilitation Sciences Institute

I have held various leadership positions in my five years at RSI (Rehabilitation Sciences Institute), including Rehabilitation Science Graduate Student Union Co-President, student lead for the RSI Handbook Committee, and Mentorship Committee Co-Chair. In 2017, I was fortunate to receive our department’s MSc Peer Mentorship Award and in 2020, to be selected for the PhD Inspiration & Leadership Award. As Co-President during my MSc, my partner and I made it one of our goals to ask students what they felt could be improved in their graduate experience and formulated our agenda around these needs. To accomplish this, we used surveys and held town halls to further understand areas of frustration for our students. We then systematically tested and changed multiple processes in the department including: (1) digitizing annual online report forms, (2) creating expectations for administrative response times to improve communication, (3) streamlining the external course application process, and (4) creating a committee of students to review and update the RSI handbook. During my PhD, as Mentorship Committee Co-Chair, I saw a need to improve the community and connection between incoming student and our more senior students and developed a mentorship program where we continually recruit upper year students to be paired with and mentor incoming students. During my PhD, I also helped establish RSI’s Annual Student-Alumni Networking Event to provide current students the opportunity to connect with alumni as an initial step in navigating potential paths following their degree. Being in academia, one of the biggest limitations that students identify in their formal training is understanding the breadth of jobs available to them outside of academia and this was one of the goals of this event.

Leadership Philosophy
Overall, through my experience as a student leader, I have always considered what the students want to get out of their experience at the University of Toronto as a prime focus of my endeavours. It is my philosophy that an event or workshop should not be run just for the sake of doing it, or because it has been done in the past, but because it will help further skills of the graduate student body that they feel need to be further developed.