For Rafael Lopes, relocating from Brazil to Canada opened exciting new career possibilities in the field of human resources. Having been a manager at Odebrecht, a major Brazilian conglomerate with operations in over 15 countries, he had extensive experience in HR technology and talent management. He had also lived in Michigan for five years as a child, giving him both language and cultural fluency.

After relocating to Toronto in May 2015, Rafael wanted to quickly re-enter the HR field, but he felt he needed to understand the particularities of the Canadian workplace. “That’s what led me to the School of Continuing Studies,” he says. Shortly after his arrival, he enrolled in online courses in Human Resources Management and Compensation at SCS. “The instructors were phenomenal at providing guidance and advice to fellow HR professionals, especially those with international backgrounds.” Not only did the courses fulfill some of the academic requirements of the Certified Human Resources Professional (CHRP) designation, the courses were valuable networking avenues that eventually landed him a job at Scotiabank, where he currently works as HR Reporting and Analytics Manager.

“At U of T, my instructors were open to connecting outside the course work, which isn’t always the case with other schools,” Lopes says. “They were really helpful and knowledgeable in the field.”

Not having many business contacts in Toronto, he learned to leverage his LinkedIn network for connections. “In Latin America, it would be very odd to reach out to a cold contact over LinkedIn and ask to connect over coffee,” he says. “Here, everyone does it. It was a matter of understanding the small differences in the way people network.”

After five months of job searching, he came to realize that Scotiabank, with its strong presence in Latin America, would be an ideal employer for him. “Through connections with my instructors, I ended up meeting someone at Scotiabank who would become a colleague in the bank’s HR department, as well as a Director who happened to be from Salvador, my hometown in Brazil,” Lopes says.

As an HR professional, Rafael has always been fascinated with how businesses operate and deliver value. “Success is rarely just about a product or service—it’s a question of ‘Do we have the right people? Are we creating the right environment to help them thrive?’” His work in the emerging field of HR reporting and analytics attempts to quantify some of those answers, rather than relying on assumptions. “My role is to help the bank implement its HR Data Governance program. This will allow us to effectively drive data-driven decision making through our employee data.” Lopes says.

Poetry is in Laboni Islam’s DNA. Her literary roots reach across continents. Born in Canada to Bangladeshi immigrant parents, her maternal grandfather was an English professor with a love of Shakespeare, and her maternal grandmother was a novelist, poet and translator.

From her very first creative stirrings— at age four, she made up a short poem about her father cutting the grass— words have fascinated her. “From a young age, I knew language was a very powerful vehicle,” she says. “It can bring such joy.”

Despite her family history, Islam’s journey to becoming a published poet wasn’t a straight line. “I think of my career path as more of a web,” Islam says. Trained as a teacher, she spent several years at an elementary school before taking her current job as Education Officer for Children and Youth at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), helping young learners create and understand art.

While she loves engaging kids in conversations about creativity, the urge to write poetry grew stronger. In 2010, she enrolled in her first Creative Writing course at SCS, “From the beginning, I knew I wanted to commit to earning the full certificate, to hold myself accountable,” she says.

She quickly overcame her initial hesitancy at sharing her first poem with the group. “The response was positive, validating, and all the encouragement I needed,” she says. Studying with established, award-winning writers such as Catherine Graham, Ken Babstock, and Karen Solie, Islam gained valuable experience workshopping her poems. The feedback process, while intimidating at first, instilled habits that strengthened her creative muscles. “I learned to revise, revise, revise,” she says. “Poetry is a language, and by immersing myself, I gained fluency.”

 In 2015, Islam completed her Certificate in Creative Writing at SCS, her courses ranging from poetry to prose and playwriting. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Canthius and Wildness, as well as The Unpublished City Anthology, curated by Dionne Brand. She is the recipient of two SCS awards: the Janice Colbert Poetry Award (2014) and the Marina Nemat Award (2016), and was shortlisted for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize.

She is currently working on her first collection of poems and teaches occasional writing workshops at the Aga Khan Museum, where she also serves as an Educator. Islam owes her newfound confidence to the supportive environment of SCS. Her classmates ranged from undergraduates to retirees to professionals juggling day jobs, but their common bond was a love of the written word. “I felt like I became part of a community of writers,” she says. “We learned so much from each other.”

When Martha Bátiz and her husband moved to Canada from Mexico in 2003, they had two-year-old twin daughters in tow and knew no one in their adoptive country. As they both pursued their respective educations—her as a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, him as an engineer working on his P.Eng.—balancing career ambitions and family life became a constant juggling act. 

“We had to make a lot of sacrifices,” she says. “But what mattered was to finish our degrees and certifications. The sooner we did, the more we had to gain from our life in Canada.” Bátiz, an award-winning writer in her native language of Spanish, enrolled in SCS’ Creative Writing certificate program as a way of improving her English and reconnecting with her literary side. “I was desperate to meet people with the same passions as me,” she says. 

To make things work, she and her husband would trade shifts with their daughters, meeting at a subway station for handoffs so that she could rush to evening classes downtown. On weekends, Bátiz pulled all-nighters to get her writing assignments done. “I was running on very little sleep,” she says. Their team efforts paid off. Bátiz published four books (including a short story collection in English), finished a Ph.D. and became a writing instructor herself, founding SCS’ Creative Writing in Spanish course (the first of its kind in Canada), taking only a week off teaching to give birth to her son. She believes her children, now 17 and 8, have a greater appreciation for education after watching Bátiz pursue continuing studies. “It instilled in them a love of learning,” she says. “My advice is if you can find any way to make it work, do it,” says Bátiz. “Why put yourself last when you’re the force that will drive your family forward?"

Over 500 lifelong learners and their families gathered in Convocation Hall to celebrate excellence in continuing education over the course of the two-night event. Learners travelled from across Canada and around the world to join in the festivities and collect their certificates in everything from accounting to creative writing.

University of Toronto Provost Cheryl Regehr and outgoing Vice-President of the University of Toronto and Principal of University of Toronto Scarborough were on hand to join SCS Dean Maureen MacDonald in leading the learner procession into Convocation Hall and congratulating learners and instructors on their achievements.