Toronto – A new initiative from the University of Toronto aims to increase the number of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour (BIPOC) in graduate programs in management, neuroscience, and psychology.
The Canada Summer Research Opportunity Program will run for 8 weeks in the summer of 2021. The program is designed to be a gateway for BIPOC students who are interested in graduate school in one of the three fields with the eventual goal of diversifying the professoriate in those respective fields.
Fifteen qualified students will take on an independent research project, conducted in collaboration with a UofT faculty mentor, and will be paid a living-wage stipend over the course of 8 weeks during the summer of 2021. The remainder of the project will be spent on other aspects of graduate admissions preparation and professional development, including an integrated Graduate Records Examination (GRE) preparation course and presentations at a virtual conference.
Students will be matched with researchers from the University’s Rotman School of Management, Department of Psychology at the St. George, Mississauga and Scarborough campuses, and the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Hospital. The program is also supported by the Institute of Management & Innovation at the University of Toronto Mississauga, theOfficeof theVice-Principal Research& Innovation at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Faculty of Arts & Science.
The UofT program is inspired by a successful diversity initiative in the United States started by the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consisting of large research-oriented universities.
““Sitting at lunch one day, my colleague Dr. Kelci Harris spoke of the importance of the BTAA’s Summer Research Opportunity Program in her path to becoming an assistant professor at the University of Victoria and how she wanted to see the program come to Canada. I knew it had to happen,” says Prof. Elizabeth Page-Gould who is the Canada Research Chair in Social
“Representation matters so much, and my motivation as one of the program organizers is to diversify the academic pipeline so that more and more students can share the experience of seeing people like them in the field in the future,” adds Prof. Sonia Kang, who is the Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and an associate professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the Rotman School of Management.
Applications are open to students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour (BIPOC) currently enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program at an undergraduate university, including those at a non-Canadian university, and who will have completed 16 semester-long classes in a relevant field by June 7, 2021. Further information is available online at canadasrop.ca.
The organizers intend to expand the program to new universities by Summer 2022.
The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
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For more information:
Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
E-mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca