More to a co-op job than just the job

from an article by Andrea Banerjee in the Inside Scoop newsletter for Waterloo co-op students

She liaises with clients and crunches numbers during business hours. She attends awareness campaigns on her lunch. She co-ordinates walkathons to raise money for World Vision and the Princess Margaret Hospital in her spare time. She holds creative office fundraisers on a regular basis. She teaches music to children with Down Syndrome in a buddy-pairing program she invented. She’s a straight-A student, a conference speaker, a pianist, a volunteer leader, an accountant and a marathon walker.

Superwoman? Nope; she’s a 20-year old Waterloo student who radiates ambition and energy.

Joanne Toporowski (right) is a 2A mathematics chartered accountancy student who has spent a summer internship and a first work term at Deloitte, where she is excelling as a tax analyst. Not only has Toporowski integrated herself fully into the company culture, her work now also fits well into her own well-rounded (and very busy) life.

Fortunately Deloitte understands that being an effective, satisfied, and well-rounded employee is about more than the desk job. With the company’s impressive support team and career counselling initiatives, employees like Toporowski are encouraged to integrate their job into the rest of their lives, rather than the opposite. So Toporowski has a personal development coach and a workload coach to assist with this process. These coaches help all employees to balance their interests, their work, and their career objectives, creating an individualized plan for everyone. New employees are also paired with a mentor within five years of their own age.

Since high school, Toporowski has been an active participant and co-ordinator of many awareness campaigns and fundraisers. Being a university student and co-op employee has not slowed her efforts. This will be her second year organizing Deloitte’s involvement in the World Partnership Walk, Canada’s largest annual campaign to fight global poverty. Corporate sponsors such as Deloitte pay a donation for each team enrolled in the walk. Toporowski’s job is to raise funds for the participation fee and recruit walkers.

Toporowski’s sneakers evidently needed more of a workout than that. This year she will also participate in the Walk to End Women’s Cancers in September — another huge event Deloitte sponsors. Toporowski is excited to take on the ambitious, 2-day, 40-kilometre walk and will be helping to co-ordinate teams from all over southwestern Ontario — no small task. “We’ve been organizing trainers to get people ready, encouraging people to get into shape and connecting with experts in the field. It’s a large undertaking for sure, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Toporowski says such volunteer work and extra-curricular involvement cultivate abilities that are more important than most students realize. How does she know? She volunteers for the Deloitte recruitment department. She scouts many smart, talented students twice a year at CA Night to choose the best potential employees.

“People in the accounting program can look very similar on paper,” she confides. “What drives us nuts as recruiters is that people think that all they need to show us is their accounting, their banking, their math skills. What we really want to see is that you have communication skills and leadership skills.” At CA Night, it’s all about discovering well-rounded identities: “This is the first time we ever meet the students and often we won’t talk about grades, marks, or accounting.”

Toporowski’s favourite thing about her professional life is the diversity. She’s had the chance to interact with colleagues on a personal level, and to collaborate on projects fuelled by diverse passions. She’s made it her mission to defy stereotypes that represent accountants as stodgy and boring. “People think it’s not a sexy career!”

Back to top

Notes in the calm after the storm

Waterloo Region was under a tornado warning for an hour or so last night, but there were no tornadoes reported, and not much damage from the thunderstorm that did arrive. Photographers had a great time capturing images of the constant lightning strikes, which knocked out the power in some Kitchener-Waterloo neighbourhoods. Trevor Kanewa of the university's plant operations department said first thing this morning that there were no outages or even flickers on the main Waterloo campus, and he wasn't aware of any flooding, downed trees or other problems. Across Ontario, people were jumpy in the wake of Sunday night's devastating tornado in Goderich, but the worst that happened was some tree damage and power outages. York University in north Toronto did experience one disaster: cancellation of a concert by Barry Manilow, scheduled for last night. It's been rescheduled for Friday.

The Canadian Association of Management Consultants, which “fosters excellence and integrity in the management consulting profession”, has announced a memorandum of agreement that will give a new qualification to graduates of Waterloo’s Master of Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. “This agreement with Waterloo ensures that MBET grads are equipped to step into consulting roles, and once they have obtained the required experience, apply to obtain the Certified Management Consultant designation,” the organization says. It says Waterloo “recognizes the value of the CMC designation to the career development of MBET graduates” and will make sure MBET students get courses in “leadership/ interpersonal skills, ethics and best practices, the process of management consulting, and project management”. As a result, “Students who have successfully completed all MBET program course requirements will have been deemed to have completed the education requirements for the Certified Management Consultant designation.”

Four researchers have been awarded Learning Initiatives Fund grants for 2011-12, says an announcement from the Centre for Teaching Excellence. The grants are meant for “research projects that support the teaching and learning elements from the strategic plans of the academic unit and/or the University of Waterloo”. The groups receiving the grants: Certina Ho, school of pharmacy, with Olla Wasfi, Mary Power, Brett Morphy, Saurabh Patel, Calvin Poon and Boris Tong, “Learning of evidence-based medicine and critical appraisal in undergraduate pharmacy students. Phase 1 — effectiveness of voluntary student-driven journal clubs.” John Lewis, school of planning, “Development and assessment of an epistemic computer game for undergraduate urban planning education.” Grit Liebscher, Germanic and Slavic studies, “Intercultural Awareness and Linguistic (mis)Understandings in Online Overseas Collaboration.” Uzma Rehman, department of psychology, “Teaching ‘how’: Developing and testing the use of client video simulations to enhance therapist competence.”

When the Ontario government established something called the Water Technologies Acceleration Project, it came with an irresistible acronym: WaterTAP. The program was created, says its web site, "to help grow globally competitive companies, and provide high-value jobs in Ontario’s water and wastewater sector. WaterTAP will also provide advice to government on developing Ontario’s water sector, with a goal of helping entrepreneurs access world-class research, talent and capital to create solutions for water management, treatment and protection." Members of its board of directors have just been announced, and they include Peter Huck of Waterloo's department of civil and environmental engineering. He's a key figure in the university's Water Institute, and the recipient of a $1.5 million provincial grant earlier this year for his research on biofiltration as a pre-treatment to reduce membrane fouling in water purification machinery.

The "spring" newsletter for alumni of Conrad Grebel University College is out, and of course says more about the college's building plans, as well as the arrival of Susan Schultz Huxman as president, succeeding Henry Paetkau. In addition, the newsletter reveals that Grebel will name its library "the Milton Good Library" to honour the founding chair of the Grebel board of governors, a long-time supporter of the college (and father of 34-year library staff member John Good). The library is in line for expansion when the new building is completed, the newsletter notes. It also includes a tribute to faculty member Arnold Snyder, who retired in June, and advance publicity for the imminent fund-raising campaign, to be called "The Next Chapter".

CAR

Back to top