November 23rd, 2020

November 23, 2020

THE VARSITY The University of Toronto’s Student Newspaper Since 1880

Vol. CXLI, No. 10

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One more week!

Winter break extended by one week for all firstentry undergraduates due to COVID-19 pandemic Graduate, professional program start dates to vary

Lauren Alexander Deputy News Editor

On November 20, U of T President Meric Gertler announced that first-entry undergraduate courses will resume January 11 instead of January 4, one week later than originally planned. Graduate and professional program start dates will vary, with some programs resuming on January 4 and some shifting to January 11.

Gertler clarified that some graduate programs are not changing their start date “to ensure that students in these programs can complete their courses in a timely manner as planned.”

At the Faculty of Arts & Science, the fall semester will still end on April 30, as originally planned, and the UTSG winter semester reading week will also remain unchanged, running from February 15–19. U of T Media Relations noted that the final exam period will be adjusted by each faculty or division.

Gertler clarified that the change comes in light of the “extraordinary amount of stress for months now” that U of T community members have faced due to the “burdens imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.” He acknowledged the unique challenges people are facing due to the pandemic, such as being responsible for athome child care.

“Others among us are experiencing isolation and mental health challenges caused or exacerbated by the pandemic,” Gertler

added, also noting that the university is working to fully complete a redesign of its mental health services, as announced last year.

The extended winter break is in line with other universities in Ontario, including McMaster University and Laurentian University, which have delayed their winter semesters as well. Some have suggested that an extended winter break may help to curb the spread of COVID-19, as Ontario has seen a surge of cases and a lockdown in downtown areas starting November 23.

The university will still close for the winter break on December 23, reopening with staff-appointed employees on January 4.

Gertler wrote that this is because shifting the semester poses administrative difficulties for staff.

U of T will also be giving employees who are returning on January 4 three extra paid days off. The days can be used with approval from their manager any time between now and August 31.

“We want to make sure that you’re able to rest and recharge, and to make the most of the upcoming holiday break,” wrote Gertler.

Student response to the extended break The decision also follows a surge of student demand for an extension of the winter break. The Arts and Science Students’ Union wrote in a tweet that it was in contact with the Faculty of Arts & Science (FAS) about the possibility of delaying the

start of the winter semester.

A popular petition also circulated amongst students, asking for winter break to be extended, which garnered over 8,000 signatures. The petition was written by second-year students Javahir Saidov and Nada Abdelaal and third-year student Rahat Charyyev.

In an email to The Varsity, Saidov, Abdelaal, and Charyyev wrote that they “did not expect [the petition] to grow so big so quickly.”

“In less than 24 hours we got almost 6 thousand votes and tremendous support.”

They cited mental health struggles that may come with the pandemic as a reason for starting the petition. A short winter break is also difficult for international students because of the required 14-day quarantine protocol when returning to Canada — should they choose to go home for the break.

Saidov, Abdelaal, and Charyyev wrote that they were surprised but thrilled with the news that winter break would be extended. Although some students indicated concerns about a potentially shorter amount of time to study for final exams, the announcement that the exam schedule will be modified was reassuring.

“We are very thankful and humbled by the overwhelming support that we and our petition has received from the UofT community,” the petition organizers wrote. Following the announcement, they have heard mostly positive feedback from students.

Faculty of Arts & Science moves winter 2021 dual delivery courses online Decision to abandon hybrid model follows growth of COVID-19 cases in Ontario

Lauren Alexander Deputy News Editor

On November 20, Dean Melanie Woodin of the Faculty of Arts & Science (FAS) announced that all dual delivery undergraduate courses will be moved fully online for the winter 2021 semester.

Woodin attributed the decision to Toronto’s public health guidelines, which ask residents to stay home as much as possible, as well as a desire to confirm the course delivery method for students as soon as possible.

Over the summer, the FAS had originally planned to offer hybrid courses for the whole year. However, all hybrid courses for the fall semester were also moved online on October 10 as cases of COVID-19 began to rise in the province. The same will now be true for the upcoming winter semester.

Some courses that have been delivered in person since the beginning of the year may continue to be delivered in person in the winter, such as some lab courses. Woodin wrote that such courses cannot teach students effectively virtually.

“These courses will continue to be carefully managed according to public health guidelines to prioritize and maximize student and faculty safety,” wrote Woodin.

New lockdown measures — which will close most nonessential businesses — were announced by Ontario Premier Doug Ford on November 20 and will be implemented on November 23. Ford announced the heightened restrictions after a drastic increase in COVID-19 cases in the province.

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First-year New College student passed away in early November Hannah Carty News Editor

Content warning: this article includes mentions of suicide.

Keshav Mayya is remembered by his friends and family as a dear friend, a talented guitarist, and a passionate mathematician.

Mayya, a first-year New College student, died by suicide on November 2. He was born in Mississauga and attended Central Peel Secondary School before starting at U of T in September.

He had a deep love for his family and friends, many long-lasting friendships, and he often spent time playing video games with his friends. His mother, Rekha Rao-Mayya, also recalled how “Keshav… would stop to pet any dog that he came across during his walk to the school bus stop.”

Mayya was studying mathematics, something he was deeply passionate about. His mother remembered how he would get excited about complex mathematical topics and try to explain them to her. “I have to admit that 90% of what he said was way too abstract for me, but I still loved to listen to him, especially when he got into his ‘professorial discourse’ mode,” she wrote.

For Vrinda Agnihotri, Mayya was her best friend, someone she could talk to for hours, and someone who made her laugh. The two met in high school and grew closer through an advanced placement psychology class that they took together. She wrote to The Varsity that he was “just genuinely the coolest.”

Mayya loved listening to and playing music. He had been playing guitar since grade seven. Over the past summer, he recorded covers of songs to share with his friends, aiming to record one every night.

He offered guitar lessons to any of his friends who wanted to learn. “Experiencing him play next to me are some of the most magical moments I will

Mayya connected with friends and family through guitar lessons, video games, and mathematics.

COURTESY OF DENNA POURMONAZAH JALILI

forever cherish,” wrote Agnihotri, who recollected Mayya teaching her how to play during lockdown.

“He is and will always be one of the most beautiful and brilliant people I will ever know.”

If you or someone you know is in distress, you can call: Canada Suicide Prevention Service phone available 24/7 at 1-833-456-4566 Good 2 Talk Student Helpline at 1-866-925-5454 Ontario Mental Health Helpline at 1-866-5312600 Gerstein Centre Crisis Line at 416-929-5200 U of T Health & Wellness Centre at 416-9788030 Warning signs of suicide include:

Talking about wanting to die Looking for a way to kill oneself Talking about feeling hopeless or having no purpose Talking about feeling trapped or being in unbearable pain Talking about being a burden to others Increasing use of alcohol or drugs Acting anxious, agitated, or recklessly Sleeping too little or too much Withdrawing or feeling isolated Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge Displaying extreme mood swings The more of these signs a person shows, the greater the risk. If you suspect someone you know may be contemplating suicide, you should talk to them, according to the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.

Chestnut, New College residents organize one-day boycott of dining hall for food unaffordability Concerns include introduction of unhealthy options, production of plastic waste under new system

Hannah Carty News Editor

Dons at Chestnut Residence and New College held a one-day boycott of the dining hall on November 1 to protest the continued lack of affordable food. They encouraged students not to access dining hall services during the day of the boycott and instead provided them with free food, funded in part by a grant from the Equity Studies Student Union as well as some donations.

The dons claim the boycott was successful, and they saw fewer students accessing the dining hall during that day. They reported that students and staff were generally interested in the goals of the boycott.

“We had an idea that we wanted to send a clear message that this was a concern for students and senior staff as well,” said Mike Lawler, a don at Chestnut. He added that the intent of the boycott was to “ensure that the administration understood the severity of the issue.”

Transition to pay-per-item model Beginning in September, the dining halls at Chestnut and New College transitioned from an all-you-care-to-eat model to a pay-per-item model, a system that residents claim is unaffordable, unhealthy, and not environmentally friendly. Colin Porter, Executive Director Food and Beverage Services & Campus Events, wrote to The Varsity that the change was due to COVID-19 restrictions on buffet-style food service.

After pushback from residents, food services

removed pay-per-weight from the dining halls, which previously required students to pay for things like bones in meat.

Some items have also decreased in price by 10– 25 per cent. However, New College residents have brought up a new concern that some prices are actually rising or fluctuating, with no prior warning.

In early October, a yogurt parfait cost $4.99, and two weeks later, the same item cost $5.39.

Even with some price reductions, the dons are still concerned that it is not feasible to eat three meals a day, especially when factoring in drinks and snacks. Residents are allocated $24 per day within the fixed price of their meal plan.

In response to some of the concerns that have been raised, Porter wrote to The Varsity that food services, as a self-funded department “must therefore work to cover all of our costs, while appreciating that our community is very price-sensitive.”

He added that food services will be adding improved communication materials with information regarding allergens and ingredients to the dining halls.

Porter also wrote that food services hopes to create a “residential food services advisory committee” with student representation. However, the dons expressed concern that certain formations of such a committee might actually limit the amount of student feedback received.

Demands from dons, residents The dons are not convinced that there is no other option that is possible during COVID-19. Amidst the pandemic over the summer, the New College

dining hall offered a system where residents paid a flat fee per dining hall entry and were able to get as much food as they wanted.

For now, the residents want to see a return to the all-you-care-to-eat model, somewhat similar to the model New College had over the summer, which could both accommodate COVID-19 restrictions and provide students the ability to eat as much as they need.

They also hope to see the return of free access to water. Access to water stations was removed along with the other changes, and residents instead were given the option to purchase a plastic water bottle.

Porter noted that the bottled water ban will be reinstated in January 2021, and food services expects to eliminate single-use plastics by December 2021. Still, residents are concerned with how much extra trash is being produced now under the pay-per-item model as a whole, where every item is individually packaged in some way.

For Sarina Ianelli, being a lead don at New College is her only source of income, leaving the dining hall as her only food option. She said that she spends around $40 a day to feed herself, much higher than the $24 per day allocated by the meal plan.

Ianelli said that she is hearing from the dons on her team that students are still having problems with the quality of food as well, something which can negatively impact well-being. “It’s one thing to be able to afford a meal, but it’s also another to enjoy your meal,” said Ianelli.

“And we’re seeing a lot of students not enjoying themselves with their food, and that’s a whole other issue.”

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NOVEMBER 23, 2020

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Hindu shrine unveiled at U of T’s Multi-Faith Centre Installation was inaugurated at Diwali ceremony on November 14

Joshua Chong Varsity Contributor

A Hindu shrine was unveiled at the University of Toronto’s Multi-Faith Centre on November 14 — the first of its kind at a public Canadian university campus, according to the Multi-Faith Centre. The permanent shrine houses seven murtis, which are divine images of Hindu deities.

A group of Hindu student volunteers in partnership with the Multi-Faith Centre, the Campus Chaplains Association, and various faculty members spearheaded the project. The shrine was funded in part by the donations of 67 donors, who contributed $5,702 in total through a GoFundMe page.

Collaboration with community members, Multi-Faith Centre In February, Director of the Multi-Faith Centre Richard Chambers approached Hindu Students Council (HSC) Co-President Himanshi Sehgal about the possibility of establishing a Hindu shrine at the centre. Previously, Hindu students like Sehgal had to travel off campus in order to find a shrine. “We were very limited in terms of where you could go,” she said. “Our closest temples were still a bus ride away.”

Sehgal, a fourth-year actuarial science and economics student, established and led an eight-member murti project committee composed of university alumni, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The project committee decided upon the de-

Back: Richard Chambers, Himanshi Sehgal, Niharikaa Aiyar, Rishabh Mundhra, Atharva Gokhale, Anvesh Jain.

Front: Nitya Gulati, Hitisha Solanki. Missing: Anvi Nagpal, Aditi Bhatia.

COURTESY OF THE MURTI PROJECT

The shrine houses seven murtis, which are images of Hindu deities.

COURTESY OF JOHNNY GUATTO/UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

sign of the shrine and which murtis to include.

At first, the planning committee faced challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was such an uncertain time,” Sehgal noted. “We weren’t sure if we’d even find enough donors.” Yet, the committee surpassed its $5,101 fundraising goal and raised almost half of it in the first 24 hours. “People were so generous,” she added. “It’s just beautiful — the way it just came together.”

The team members originally planned on inaugurating the shrine in the summer, but the pandemic forced them to delay the unveiling. “It all worked out at the end because it coincided with Diwali,” Anvesh Jain, a fourth-year international relations student and member of the project committee, said in an interview with The Varsity.

The shrine was revealed at an event for the major Hindu holiday Diwali that was live streamed for community members via Facebook and hosted by Jain. “This was an effort borne of remarkable thought, dedication, and perseverance in the face of unexpected adversity, especially in a year like this one,” he said in the inauguration speech. “Let us promise that this will remain a space for open spiritual discussion and honest philosophical exchange.”

The centrepiece of the shrine is a murti of Lord Shri Ganesh, the Hindu god of beginnings, who is often worshipped at the beginning of prayer. Among the six other murtis in the shrine is Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge.

A part of campus life for years to come Looking forward, Sehgal hopes that the shrine will be a site where Hindu students on campus can worship and attend larger events or festivities hosted by HSC. Though the pandemic has affected large-scale gatherings, the HSC has begun to coordinate with the Multi-Faith Centre in order to have a Hindu priest officiate prayers. There are also plans to create special darshan times when Hindu community members can visit the shrine for blessings.

“The installation of the murtis at the Multi-Faith Centre is a tangible expression of the University’s commitment to religious freedom and engagement of the whole person,” Chambers wrote in an email to The Varsity.

Jain expressed that he was proud of the success of the project and how it has stirred excitement within the Hindu community. “It was conceived by students, planned by students, and actually implemented by students,” he said. “I’m happy that it was us — that we were the first ones to make history.”

However, Jain is most excited about the legacy that this project will leave behind, long after he leaves the university. He said, “This is something I want to be able to come back to with my kids in 10, 20 years, and I want to be able to bring them and pray here. I want to look and tell them and say, ‘You know what? This is something your dad helped do.’ ”

Recently launched Investigative Journalism Bureau will feature collaboration between academia and media New model aims to make investigative journalism more economically viable

Marta Anielska Associate News Editor

The Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH) has recently launched the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB), a collaborative newsroom that brings together students, journalists, and researchers to work on large investigative projects that may be of public interest. The bureau, which will be launching its first project later this month, aims to produce major investigative projects and teach students investigative skills.

The high cost and time-consuming nature of investigative journalism means that it is often cut due to budget restraints despite its importance to the industry and the public. Robert Cribb, the founder and director of the IJB, told The Varsity that he hopes the model will preserve a practice that is often crippled by a “restrictive economic lens.”

Collaboration between academics, journalists, and media outlets The project will take advantage of the overlap between the research undertaken by journalists and academics. According to Cribb, the combined resources of media companies and educational institutions provides a potentially valuable model that “benefits not just the public in terms of journalism,” but also journalists who can conduct more in-depth work and students who can gain experience.

The IJB is partnering with 10 universities in

Canada and a number of media platforms, such as the Toronto Star and NBC News. One of the first steps to developing a project is negotiating with media partners so that the project will have the widest possible reach.

“A lot of people read daily newspapers… they are the lifeblood of the news flow,” Cribb explained. “They come out every day and they shape the conversation on a daily basis. They are mass consumed.”

The IJB’s model will also allow investigations to be relevant to local areas, as opposed to stories in magazines that do investigations with a larger scope, such as those in The New Yorker. Even though the model is yet to be tested, Cribb believes that collaborative journalism should grow because of its advantages to news stories.

The IJB has partnered with the DLSPH for several reasons, according to Cribb, including the “visionary leadership” at the school and the fact that, as a school of public health, it has been very actively involved with newspapers over the last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He added that as a “hub area of inquiry,” the school has a broad reach into issues that are newsworthy.

Professor Adalsteinn Brown, the dean of DLSPH, noted that the current pandemic has also proved how important it is to engage Canadians in matters of public health. He added that collaboration between academics and journalists can “bring important new insights to the public” and even save lives.

The program will combine journalistic and academic styles of research.

JORDAN AHARONI/THEVARSITY

Benefits to journalism and students The program will also offer students a great opportunity to develop research and investigative skills. “Students… gain these skills from public records research, to premium information requests, to investigative interviewing skills,” Cribb noted. According to the IJB’s website, students can get involved with the program through credited practicums or class projects.

He added that many students who participate in these kinds of programs go on to have very successful careers in media. “After contributing

to stories that have changed minds and public policy, many leave with a passion and conviction for this work. When that happens, we all win.”

While university-affiliated investigative programs are not common, there are some nonprofits that conduct similar work to the IJB. Cribb said that there’s no way to know whether university-affiliated investigations will expand, but that there has been a definite shift to nonprofit journalism. “It is, without question, a more impactful way of doing the work we do in the service of the public interest.”

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Family and friends start campaign to create bursary in memory of late U of T law graduate Jamal Akim Howlader remembered as kind and thoughtful, with a passion for helping others

Marta Anielska Associate News Editor

After the unexpected and tragic death of Jamal Akim Howlader, a recent graduate from the U of T Faculty of Law, on November 5, friends and family have set up a fundraiser on GoFundMe to establish a bursary fund at the faculty in Howlader’s name.

The bursary will be awarded on a basis of financial need and academic excellence to students who embody Howlader’s values. The campaign has raised almost $27,000 to date.

In an interview with The Varsity, Denna Pormonazah Jalili, the organizer of the fundraiser, said that though Howlader was a “very simple guy… the one thing that he did always value was his studies.” Jalili added that, given that Howlader was a recipient of financial aid from the Faculty of Law, he thought that a scholarship based on financial need would be an appropriate legacy.

Scholarship process and campaign The Faculty of Law has a $25,000 minimum quota to establish any scholarship. Given that the campaign has reached that goal, the remainder of the money will now be invested in the university’s endowment to collect interest. The interest made from that amount will then be matched by the university every year and will be combined with the fundraised amount to form the bursary amount.

Jalili expressed shock at the amount of traction gained and money raised in just a few days, going far beyond the initial $5,000 goal. “The sort

of thinking was [that], between his closest friends and family, we could conceivably piece together $5,000 a year… And we just blew past everything.”

When asked why he thought the campaign had gained so much attention, Jalili said the community had come together to honour someone who was positive and kind on a daily basis. Jalili noted that even the people Howlader didn’t know very well reached out to pay their respects. He decided to set up the fund when people began asking where they could donate on his behalf.

Most of the donations on the page contain at least a small note commemorating Howlader, but many are longer. They range from more personal notes from close friends to thoughtful comments from people who knew him in elementary or high school.

“I personally believe that you die twice in life: once when your physical body expires and once when you’re forgotten,” Jalili said. “If you live a good life, if you are a friendly person, if you care about people, if you show empathy to people, you don’t know what a little bit of empathy to you might be monumental [to] someone else.”

“If you take yourself out of your blinders… you will leave yourself a beautiful legacy, and that will outlast your time here.”

Scholarship recipients and goals The criteria for the bursary will put a focus on financial aid and academic excellence, but there will also be a secondary criterion of mentorship and community involvement. Howlader used to tutor high school students in math through a mentorship program, a job that he took very seriously.

Recent law graduate Jamal Akim Howlader.

COURTESY OF DENNA PORMONAZAH JALILI

Howlader also provided low-income members of the community with free legal advice through Downtown Legal Services, a legal clinic affiliated with the Faculty of Law. “We want recipients to embody those characteristics of mentorship and community involvement,” said Jalili.

Jalili also emphasized the importance of offering opportunities to students who may not be in the best financial position. He noted that the high amount of debt that many law students have

might push them toward areas of law that they are not necessarily as interested in.

Howlader “was a big, big community guy,” Jalili concluded. “And so hopefully, whoever is helped by this payout… would want to do the same once they’re in a position to.”

In an email to The Varsity, the Faculty of Law wrote that “a donor’s decision to establish a needsbased bursary at the Faculty of Law ensures that tuition will not be a barrier to education or career.”

U of T opens new student equity census to collect demographic information on students

University aims to use data to highlight, address barriers affecting marginalized students Khatchig Anteblian Associate News Editor

On November 16, U of T’s Office of the ViceProvost Students (OVPS) released a student equity census. The first of its kind at U of T, the census aims to collect demographic information on students in hopes of creating a more inclusive environment at the university.

The census was created to be in line with U of T’s Statement on Equity, Diversity, and Excellence, which was released in 2006. The statement highlights U of T’s commitment to providing an inclusive environment for all people, and U of T’s goal of reducing the “adverse effects of any barriers to full participation in University life that [it finds], including physical, environmental, attitudinal, communication or technology.”

U of T pledged to collect and release demographic data on students in 2017 but had no timeline for the process in 2018. The equity census is a step that can finally allow U of T to fulfill its non-binding pledge from 2017.

An advisory board is being organized — consisting of students, staff, and faculty — to determine how to report and use the data from the census.

What data the survey gathers The survey is open to all U of T undergraduate and graduate students at the three campuses and can be accessed on ACORN, Quercus, or the OVPS website. The survey has no deadline, and data will be collected on an ongoing basis.

While the data collected is not anonymous, personal information will be kept confidential in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act; only aggregate data will be published. Participation in

the census is voluntary, and all of the questions have a “prefer not to answer” option.

The survey gathers a broad range of data, including information about gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, race and Indigenous identity, and education of parents or

Response from a student leader Alex McLean, Vice-President Equity for the University of Toronto Students’ Union, wrote in an email to The Varsity, “Marginalized students at U of T continue to face numerous barriers and challenges as a result of inadequate support and a one-sizefits-all model to many University of Toronto services… The purpose of this survey is to identify those gaps, break down barriers, and develop equitable solutions.”

She believes that universities that ignore the demographics of their students are complicit in upholding colonial, white-centric views. “It is important that we continuously work to decolonize our policies and practices by advancing the interests of [the Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) community],” she wrote.

She also stressed the need to increase funding and support for BIPOC students on campus.

McLean highlighted the importance of taking an intersectional approach to mental health and accessibility services, seeing this as crucial to addressing the distinct experiences of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.

This sentiment of hoping to EVELYN HAYES/THEVARSITY improve equity, diversity, and inclusion is reflected in a statement women, people with disabilities, and members on the U of T Student Equity Census page: of the LGBTQ+ community. “This survey will “The U of T Student Equity Census supports allow us to examine and, if necessary, rebuild these values by helping us to better understand frameworks within the institution to ensure the diversity of our student population and deevery student is truly represented,” said Vice- velop programs and initiatives that support the success and inclusion of our students.”

Provost Students Sandy Welsh. guardians. There is also space at the end of the survey where participants can submit feedback.

The goal of the survey is to identify barriers that exist within the university that affect racialized students, Indigenous students,

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NOVEMBER 23, 2020

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U of T joins City of Toronto project to research impacts of COVID-19 University contributing to studies on air quality, internet access for low-income communities

Jessica Han Varsity Staff

The City of Toronto has partnered with various local higher education institutions, including the University of Toronto, to lead eight COVID-19 research projects, so far, in response to the pandemic and to put Toronto on a path of recovery. Two research projects, COVID Impacts on Toronto Air Quality and Toronto’s Digital Divide, are collaborations between U of T and other universities and colleges.

City of Toronto connects GTA universities The city chose the projects and drafted research proposals related to the priorities of the Office of Recovery and Rebuild, which studies Toronto’s

recovery from the impacts COVID-19. Then, all postsecondary institutions were allowed to indicate whether or not they were interested in any specific proposal given their expertise.

In an email to The Varsity, a City of Toronto spokesperson summarized that the City of Toronto “reviewed the proposals, selected partners and formed project teams to best meet the City’s research needs.”

With this COVID-19 initiative beginning to move forward, the City of Toronto and Mitacsv — a nonprofit national organization that fosters growth and innovation — have funded research projects where necessary. In the case of some projects, the city has directly funded universities and colleges to aid in research costs.

Considerable funding is allocated for hiring stu-

Professors at UTM will do COVID-19 research along with other universities.

HAYDEN MAK/THEVARSITY

dents to conduct the research. The spokesperson concluded that the eight research projects would provide the city “with valuable insight to support COVID-19 response and recovery.”

In a statement to U of T News, U of T President Meric Gertler said, “We welcome the City of Toronto’s collaborative approach to these pressing issues.”

Research into Toronto’s air quality Matthew Adams, a UTM assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Planning, along with Greg Evans, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, will be researching the impact of COVID-19 on Toronto’s air quality. U of T and Ryerson University have partnered together to conduct studies on this project.

In an email to The Varsity, Adams described the goals of this project. One is to contribute to the City of Toronto’s Climate Change Action Plan by creating further “understanding of air pollutant sources and human-related activities.”

Another goal is to identify a potential connection between air pollution exposure and higher rates of catching COVID-19.

He wrote that this project will take a look at the concentration of air pollutants at different levels of movement restrictions put in place to combat COVID-19.

When asked about the motivations that caused him to take on the project, Adams explained that “COVID-19 has produced so many unknowns, I believed [the research group and I] could contribute to understanding some of the effects as we progress through the pandemic.”

Students have the chance to research the proj-

ects through graduate student training. Adams wrote that graduate students will have the opportunity to “conduct state-of-the-art research in identification of sources of air pollution and experience how the City of Toronto might use this information in the development and evaluation of policy scenarios.”

Digital access research Toronto’s Digital Divide is a study on digital access and how low-income communities lack access to the internet. Behind the project are Paolo Granata, an assistant professor and coordinator for the book and media studies program, and Leslie Chan, an associate professor at UTSC’s Centre for Critical Development Studies.

Four other postsecondary institutions — Humber College, Ryerson University, Seneca College, and York University — are also working on the study.

Granata wrote in an email to The Varsity that the City of Toronto partnered with the Media Ethics Lab primarily to collect data in Toronto, mapping out “who is underserved by digital infrastructure, especially in vulnerable populations and communities.” He added that this study would also help to understand intersecting factors that limit digital access and affect the ability to access supports.

With the project underway, Granata and the Media Ethics Lab team expressed that they are striving to work toward a more equitable and healthy digital planet by examining barriers that block “digital inclusion and participation.”

They are hoping to create a sustainable framework in which everyone has “optimal digital resources.”

UTSC Campus Council discusses COVID-19 accommodations at November meeting

Council provided updates on course delivery, ancillary operations, Indigenous house Alexa DiFrancesco UTSC Bureau Chief

The UTSC Campus Council’s meeting on November 17 focused heavily on the campus’ response to COVID-19.

Members provided updates on course delivery for the winter 2021 semester, academic accommodations during COVID-19, and UTSC’s upcoming Indigenous House, which is expected to begin construction in the summer of 2021.

Course delivery for winter 2021 William Gough, UTSC Vice-Principal Academic and Dean, briefly reported on UTSC’s future teaching deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gough reported that, for the winter semester, UTSC has decided to include in-person instruction for certain classes. Gough further explained that “teaching labs and courses that use our campus kitchen will have in-person elements on campus” and that the decision would affect approximately 750 students. “Most labs will be used twice a day with the appropriate cleaning,” Gough said.

Gough added that UTSC would make decisions involving in-class delivery for the summer 2021 semester late in the winter semester. He mentioned that UTSC will consider a hybrid approach of inperson and remote teaching should a COVID-19 vaccine be developed before that time. Gough said that he is “hopeful that the fall of 2021 will be returned to mainly in-person delivery.”

Student accommodations during COVID-19 With regard to additional COVID-19 accommodations for students, Desmond Pouyat, UTSC’s Dean of Student Affairs, reported that UTSC will be continuing to include

time-zone considerations as part of its exam conflict criteria for next semester.

Pouyat explained that the policy means that if a student “[has] an exam that is scheduled outside of a normal time period, in [their] location, [they] can declare this as a conflict that needs accommodation.”

UTSC has also adapted its policies to consider COVID-19 through the use of the Self-Declaration of Illness form, which is used across all three U of T campuses. The form allows students to formally self-declare an illness to receive up to three days of academic accommodation for missed term work.

Pouyat said that, in the fall semester so far, about 1.5 per cent of UTSC students have used the tool and that UTSC has found that students have not misused the form.

Pouyat emphasized the changes UTSC has implemented in order to support student mental health during COVID-19, such as the six weekly counselling sessions that have been offered virtually to students as of this fall. Pouyat explained that two of the six weekly sessions focus on managing anxiety, which he described as being “one of the top issues [UTSC] students are experiencing.”

Pouyat also mentioned that UTSC’s Academic Advising & Career Centre has noticed an uptick in students requesting its services, primarily for help with graduate and professional school applications and employment services. “Clearly, students are worried about getting their first jobs,” Pouyat said.

Ancillary operations Andrew Arifuzzaman, UTSC Campus Council’s Chief Administrative Officer, explained that U of

The UTSC Campus Council met on November 17.

MICHAEL PHOON/THEVARSITY

T’s ancillary operations “have really been decimated as a result of [COVID-19].”

Arifuzzaman partially attributed the loss of income to food services, elaborating that, of UTSC’s 11 food operations, only one — the campus’ Tim Hortons — is currently operating. Arifuzzaman reported that the Tim Hortons was generating between $9,000 and $10,000 a day in sales pre-pandemic, but is now earning between $700 and $800 daily.

Arifuzzaman noted that, though UTSC’s food services are declining in profit, the campus is scheduled to accommodate various filming projects in the upcoming year. Arifuzzaman assured the council that film crews are “incredibly diligent about health and safety because the last thing that they can afford is to be shut down.”

“We’ve had [The Handmaid ’s Tale] filming on the campus in the fall; we have Star Trek: Discovery filming in January and February,” Arifuzzaman said. “And there’s another film that has just started negotiations with [UTSC].”

Arifuzzaman estimated that Highland Hall’s COVID-19 testing centre, which is in collaboration with the Scarborough Health Network, will begin operation on December 1.

He also mentioned that Swim Canada had contacted UTSC to help facilitate the Summer 2021 Olympic Trials, which will be held at the Pan Am Sports Centre.

Indigenous House The meeting concluded with updates from Arifuzzman about UTSC’s upcoming Indigenous House.

Arifuzzaman described the building as being located on UTSC’s north campus “between the Centennial College building at the corner of Morningside and Ellesmere,” in a space beside the campus’ Instructional Centre and Environmental Science and Chemistry Building.

He noted the importance of the building’s location, mentioning that “[UTSC] selected the site [because] it has a spectacular four season view of the Highland Creek ravine.”

According to Arifuzzaman, UTSC consulted with roughly 45 Elders and knowledge keepers in terms of design. He confirmed that the building’s construction “will absolutely include Indigenous apprentices” and that UTSC will work with community partners to try to give Indigenous youth interested in being apprentices “some sense of priority to be constructors on this project.”

Business

November 23, 2020 var.st/business biz@thevarsity.ca

Beyond the targeted options, the UTSU also offers an Emergency Bursary for general situations when students find themselves in financial hardship.

Students can apply for all UTSU financial assistance programs via the application form on the UTSU website.

The Explainer: U of T financial assistance options What resources are available if OSAP and UTAPS aren’t enough?

A rundown of financial assistance at U of T.

CORINNE LANGMUIR/THEVARSITY

Spencer Y. Ki Business & Labour Editor

In these uncertain times, budgets can fall through and sometimes savings are not enough to cover unexpected expenses. In these circumstances, students should be aware of the financial resources available to them as members of the U of T community.

The basics When budgeting for a school year, every Ontariobased student should apply to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). A single OSAP application covers both provincial and federal student assistance programs, allowing applicants to manage all of their government educational assistance funds from one portal.

In addition to hopefully covering the majority of one’s scholastic overhead, an OSAP application automatically makes one considered for University of Toronto Advanced Planning for Students (UTAPS) assistance — the university’s financial aid program for when OSAP is not sufficient. NonOntarian students can apply for UTAPS through a special out-of-province application form.

Colleges, faculties, and campuses Each college, satellite campus, and professional faculty has specific financial aid resources availed to affiliated students. Additionally, many of these resources are grants or bursaries instead of loans, meaning that the money will not have to be paid back later.

Every division has its own application process, so you can visit your specific institution’s website

for relevant information. With the fall semester winding down and the winter semester just around the corner, many funds are now open for another wave of applications. Many registrar offices also offer financial advice, so booking an appointment with your registrar to discuss your financial situation could be a good idea.

The University of Toronto Students’ Union The University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) offers a large variety of grants, bursaries, and financial assistance options for students across a range of qualifications. Individual options include the Transit Bursary — intended to cover the cost of a PRESTO card — and the Health and Wellness Bursary — intended to cover costs of additional health-related resources that are not included in the UTSU’s Health and Dental Plan.

U of T emergency grants While the university generally intends for UTAPS to cover any academic costs that OSAP does not, U of T also has recourse available for mid-academicyear emergencies. Whereas OSAP and UTAPS eligibility is generally determined at the beginning of each semester, U of T Emergency Assistance Grants are evaluated on a rolling basis in response to unexpected situations.

This year, the university has expanded the program to include COVID-19 Emergency Undergraduate Grants to subsidize students expenses directly related to the pandemic. Applications for this COVID-19related grant and standard emergency grants are evaluated through the same portal.

Lines of credit If all else fails, many Canadian banks have lines of credit specifically offered to university students. A line of credit is a ‘middle ground’ between credit cards and loans, where a borrower is authorized to borrow up to a large amount — typically several tens of thousands of dollars — but only pays interest on the portion of the credit they are currently using.

Specific terms and conditions depend on the financial institution and can also depend on what you’re studying. For example,TD Canada Trust offers a $20,000 per year line of credit to undergraduate students — for a maximum of $80,000 over four years of study — while also offering medical students a $325,000 line of credit during their period of study and eventual residency.

U of T scientists win big on Angels Den 2020

Take on popular game show sees smart garments, bedsore tech, post-COVID-19 treatment sweep awards Anira Mohsen Varsity Contributor

On September 30, St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation hosted its annual Angels Den, a research funding and entrepreneurship competition structured in the style of the popular game show Dragons’ Den. This year, the event was streamed virtually and consisted of six competing teams of medical scientists from St. Michael’s Hospital.

The ultimate victors were Dr. Kieran McIntyre and Dr. Darren Yuen for their work on postCOVID-19 lung scarring screening, Dr. Karen Cross for her bedsore-fighting handheld tool, and Dr. Jane Batt for her smart garments that prevent muscle decay. All four physicians are specialists at St. Michael’s Hospital, as well as U of T faculty.

The teams competed for the Keenan COVID-19 Research Award — a pandemicfocused award worth $150,000 — the Odette Innovative Health Award — aimed at promoting accessible health care and worth $150,000 —and the People’s Choice Award — awarded by a popular vote among viewers and worth $50,000. None of the teams walked away empty-handed though, as every project that didn’t win a top prize was still supported with $25,500 in funding.

The contestants were judged by a panel of three celebrity judges: Joe Mimran and Michele Romanow — two former ‘dragons’ on Dragons’ Den — and Vinay Virmani — Chief Commercial Officer of Uninterrupted, a site for top athletes to share their stories — as well as more than 50 online, off site jurors.

Post-COVID-19 lung treatment McIntyre, an assistant professor in U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a respirologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, and Yuen, an assistant professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine and a nephrologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, won the Keenan COVID-19

Research Award. Their project sought to screen lung scarring in COVID-19 survivors who continue to exhibit symptoms after recovery.

McIntyre and Yuen helped establish the COVID Lung Clinic, where recovering COVID-19 patients are treated for symptoms such as breathlessness and lung scarring. They came up with the idea of assessing lung scarring efficiently with a bedside, handheld ultrasound tool that is safer and more compact than its alternatives.

Battling bedsores Cross, an assistant professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine and a reconstructive and aesthetic surgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital, was the winner of the Odette Innovative Health Award.

Her project addressed the bedsore, or pressure wound, epidemic in long-term and elderly hospital patients.

After experiencing a close call with a family member and dealing with a death related to pressure wounds, Cross was inspired to design

Dr. Darren Yuen and Dr. Kieran McIntyre are two physicians whose big idea won big on Angels Den.

COURTESY OF ST MICHAELS HOSPITAL FOUNDATION

In an interview with The Varsity, McIntyre said that the Angels Den funding had already allowed him and Yuen to kickstart their project and that the newest version of their device had just been approved.

McIntyre and Yuen hope that their project will help eliminate the need for COVID-19 survivors to continue being tested. They look to gather real-time data on past patients to make health care services more efficient and safely physically-distanced during the pandemic

Skin Imaging for Pressure Wounds (SkIP): a handheld device that uses infrared light to look beneath the skin. It additionally interfaces with a smartphone app that can be used by nonmedical professionals, including any bedside caretakers, to detect whether a patient is at risk of developing pressure wounds.

During the Angels Den live stream, Cross said that she seeked to use the funding to immediately put the device through trials before moving to manufacturing and commercialization.

Manufacturing and distribution of SkIP would

take place through MIMOSA Diagnostics, which she co-founded.

Smart garments for muscle decay Batt, an associate professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine and a respirologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, had her project selected for the People’s Choice Award. Her pitch featured smart garments that utilize artificial intelligence to stimulate decaying muscles in critically ill patients. Roughly 250,000 Canadians are admitted to intensive care units (ICU) every year, and many potentially face muscle decay due to inactivity.

What sets Batt’s garment apart from its commercially available competitors is its ability to use sensors that can be programmed to treat many ICU patients at once in a customized way. She explained that the currently available muscle decay solution, Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation, is not practical since it is not generally economically accessible.

Batt explained that the smart garments were currently being prototyped and that the prize money would enable her team to complete development, file for intellectual property protections, and gain industry and consultation partners to guide them through the regulatory process.

A novel approach to funding Angels Den has been around since 2014 and has since grown from a small, internal St. Michael’s Hospital showcase to a popular attraction. Amid a pandemic, the event garnered much interest, and thousands of online viewers had taken part in the competition’s dynamic set up.

In a time when research funding can be exceedingly difficult to come by for small-scale researchers, unorthodox venues like Angels Den can contribute greatly to the progression of medical innovation in Canada.

“I really want to highlight that the Angels Den is a unique funding opportunity for scientists and clinicians to advance something that evolves the care that would not otherwise be granted funding,” said McIntyre.

Editorial

November 23, 2020 var.st/comment editorial@thevarsity.ca

Lacking centralization, tuition transparency — U of T’s 2020 COVID-19 response falls short Admin must be more decisive, proactive for student finances, mental health The Varsity Editorial Board

In its COVID-19 roadmap, the university outlines three guiding principles in dealing with the pandemic: promoting health and safety, advancing academic excellence, and meeting the needs of the community. However, The Varsity believes that the university administration has taken a minimalistic and reactive approach to this public health crisis.

Over the summer, community members raised numerous concerns about the insufficiency of the university’s reopening plan, particularly in terms of workers’ safety, income, employment, and generally in terms of the riskiness of in-person learning. Even the most basic matter of providing masks to community members came into question due to quality concerns.

We call on the university to take on a more proactive and centralized approach in how it tackles the crisis — and properly address the financial and mental health circumstances of the pandemic faced by students.

Abandoning decentralization In the spring, the university committed to a hybrid model where academic units — faculties and campuses — would be able to varyingly provide the option for students to take both online and in-person classes. This decision came despite general expectations of a second COVID-19 wave in the fall that would, as many students foresaw, inevitably push most, if not all, learning back online.

Confronted with the evolving nature of the pandemic, most academic units ultimately chose to be predominantly online. The Faculty of Arts & Science (FAS) backtracked on this matter to an extent — allowing instructors to switch to online learning. Still, many students remained signed up for in-person courses at the beginning of the fall semester.

Reactive decision making was further reinforced when the second wave became apparent in early October — leading academic units that had not already pushed all non-essential learning online to do so. This was frustrating, costly, and unfair to many students who, under the expectation of being offered an inperson learning experience, had already committed to travel to their campus and sign a lease for the year.

The university fell short in two ways. First of all, even as the university acknowledged that the responsible decision was to reduce in-person learning, it did so in its typically decentralized manner — different academic units seemed to be asked to respond individually and voluntarily, just as it was left up to them to offer courses in the manner they saw fit.

Faced with a public health crisis, the university administration must abandon its standard governance approach and embrace centralized, uniform decision making for the good of the entire community. Students recall that the university fell short with this approach in another safety-related situation in the winter of 2019, when the fact that its three campuses dealt with severe weather conditions in different ways came under criticism.

This brings us to the second point:

if the university were to take on such a crisis with a centralized approach, it would be able to make bold, early, uniform, and proactive decisions, as opposed to reactive ones as decided by a given faculty or campus.

Thrusting students into uncertain in-person circumstances during fall 2020 was clearly not the right call. The prudent decision would have been to push all learning online, with the exception of a small minority of essential activities that require physical presence.

Ahead of winter 2021, the university can choose to — immediately — make a centralized call that relieves the entire community of its public health uncertainties: it can move all courses that are not essential to be in person, online. Students should be not be expected to prepare for circumstances that are regularly changing, as happened with courses during the fall.

Ideally, the university should have made this decision to go completely online for the entire 2020–2021 academic year. The University of Cambridge, for example, announced early on in May that all lectures would be online until the summer of 2021. Making the safe and responsible decisions proactively and early on allows for students to plan ahead in ways that do not cost them later down the road.

Providing financial, mental health relief Since the summer, there have been significant student calls for the university to provide tuition relief, especially as many courses have been offered online. This concerns international students in particular, who pay enormous tuition rates. The predominance of online learning has only expanded with the onset of the second wave this fall — and so the question of tuition relief continues to be important.

The university must answer: as most courses move online, which implies that inperson facilities and costs have been reduced, why are students not being offered relief for tuition fees? Why are incidental fees not being further reduced as services like gyms are discontinued?

The global economic impact of the pandemic has been severe, including for students struggling to finance their studies and living.

Accordingly, the university’s lack of investment in this area is deeply concerning. As the wealthiest academic institution in Canada, the university’s top priority ought to be to financially support its students and workers.

At the very least, the university must be fully transparent to the community about its costs during the pandemic and why it feels that existing tuition and incidental fees are justified this year.

Aside from financial challenges, students also face significant mental health barriers this year. The lack of an in-person campus experience combined with the unique challenges of online learning contribute to isolation, alienation, and disengagement. Many students find it difficult to perform in courses under these circumstances.

The mental health crisis at U of T precedes the pandemic, but the pandemic does serve to further expose it. The death of a student this month — the fifth student death since June 2018 — reinforces the need for the university to re-evaluate its approach to mental health and to challenge its hyper-competitive academic culture.

Clearly, the university must invest more — not only in the services it offers toward mental health, but also in its outreach to students. U of T must ensure that the community is aware of the kinds of support that are available, and

make sure that they do not experience barriers or fear of retribution in accessing them.

Outside of immediate mental health policy, there must be more uniform decision making when it comes to offering academic relief. We applaud, for example, that the FAS is offering late withdrawals and credit/no credit options until the end of the term this year. But we believe that such options should be guaranteed to all students, on all campuses. The university should take on a centralized approach to mandate such relief.

We are alarmed by the range of student concerns that have been raised about the unique challenges of online learning, whether in terms of digital participation; the inaccessibility of technology; the nature of asynchronous courses’ assignments, digital examination, and grading; and the need for generous accommodations.

The university must actively solicit feedback and respond to these concerns this year, as well as ensure that all academic units prioritize academic compassion and accessibility under these new learning circumstances.

It is clear that the COVID-19 crisis poses unique challenges — but we believe that it also provides for new opportunities. We hope that the pandemic compels the university to understand the need to take on more proactive and centralized decision making in the service of the broader community. The status quo will not meaningfully help students face financial and mental health challenges at this unprecedented historical moment.

The Varsity’s editorial board is elected by the masthead at the beginning of each semester. For more information about the editorial policy, email editorial@thevarsity.ca.

Simcoe Hall, where U of T’s Governing Council meets.

TOSIN MAIYEGUN/THEVARSITY

Comment

November 23, 2020 var.st/comment comment@thevarsity.ca

U of T’s new equity census is a welcome initiative — but it’s only the first step Survey must be used to develop, implement meaningful anti-racism policies

Janine AlHadidi Varsity Contributor

On November 16, acting Vice-Provost Students Micah Stickel sent an email to all students informing them of a new questionnaire, the U of T Student Equity Census, that will collect data on the identities of students at the University of Toronto. This anonymous questionnaire is aimed at collecting more data on ethnicity, race, gender identity, disability, Indigeneity, and sexual orientation and is accessible to all students with a UTORID. The collection of identity-based data for students is an important step forward — although it is worth expressing concern that it has taken four years since the initial commitment to take such action.

Race-based data provides a holistic view of the demographics on campus and helps to identify representation gaps for racialized and other marginalized students. This information can help develop equitable policies that can implement much needed long-term structural change. The data can provide the necessary support for the growing diversity of the student body, and tackle systemic racism at U of T. U of T’s questionnaire comes at a crucial time when students are demanding the collection of more race-based data on campus to better address the social, economic, and mental health needs of racialized students at U of T. On September 30, the All Out Virtual Protest organized by student leaders from racialized groups and allies from universities in the GTA further addressed these needs. The protest called for racial justice for Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) com-

munities in Canada, calling for more forms of aid for BIPOC students and the collection of race-based data demographics.

However, the question remains: what will happen to the data once the survey is completed by thousands of students across U of T’s three campuses? And if the data is used to advocate for change at the university, what will that change look like for underrepresented communities?

The change must start at the policy and community level. Through specific race-based data, more transparency must be delivered

with regard to recruitment, financial aid, and information on campus safety. When students report discrimination cases at the university level, they can be supported by the necessary data to push for collective change, echoing the needs of different communities on campus.

To hold the university accountable to change, anti-racism task forces can help — which we have seen develop this year at Trinity College and at U of T as a whole. Race-based data can help to provide clear targets for task forces so that students can have confidence in their goals.

U of T’s equity census is an important opportunity for the university to look inward — not only on the matter of race, but also other dimensions like sexuality and gender. But it is only the first step — the university must show that, and how, it is willing to use the data to effect meaningful change.

Janine AlHadidi is a fourth-year political science and diaspora and transnational studies student at St. Michael ’s College.

Race-based data is essential to developing equity policies.

COURTESY OF MAURO MORA/UNSPLASH

In-person placements shouldn’t be a medical graduate requirement this year The pandemic makes these opportunities impractical and dangerous

Ashley Mutasa Varsity Contributor

The answer to whether in-person placements in medical programs should be waived is multifaceted and complex. There are numerous factors to consider: the vulnerability of the population being served, the ability of virtual learning to meet inperson objectives, and the societal risks associated with waiving in-person placements.

Each program should carefully evaluate and weigh these different risks. Although we can argue about the indispensability of placements to given professions, the practicality of conducting in-person placements will always be the greatest limitation.

For nursing and medical students, the demands of the current pandemic on hospitals have made clinical placements impractical. Many doctors and nurses are working beyond their normal hours and

MIA CARNEVALE/THEVARSITY

regularly filling vacancies left by colleagues who have contracted COVID-19. As physicians and nurses are already overwhelmed, the quality of education that can be given to students might be severely compromised.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, some graduate placements have been postponed, cancelled, or converted to online formats.

The impact of these changes on students’ competence and future employability remains unknown.

In a 15-year outlook, the Association of American Medical Colleges predicted that COVID-19 will have consequences on the practice of medicine, speciality choices, and workforce retention patterns.

The final years of many graduate programs get students out of the classroom and into a real-world setting. For many students, including medical and nursing students, in-person placements are an opportunity to practice hands-on skills, develop professional competencies, network, and explore different specialties.

Although industry placements offer an exciting change from classroom learning, they also present numerous challenges. Overcoming these challenges helps students to develop the grit and perseverance they need to be successful in their fields of study.

Currently, hospitals have a higher risk of COVID-19 exposure. Prevailing shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) also make it difficult for students to learn safely. Limiting medical students’ clinical rotations will not only preserve their health and safety, it will also conserve scarce PPE, such as masks, gloves, and gowns.

Furthermore, students who have underlying health conditions or anxiety about working during

the pandemic might not feel comfortable completing their clinical placements this year. However, students should not have to choose between safety and graduation. While in-person placements are important, the safety and mental well-being of students should also be considered.

While the role of medical students is indispensable to clinical efficiency, it is important to remember that medical students are not employees. The priority should be for these students to learn the fundamentals of medicine. Unfortunately, meeting these teaching objectives may be difficult to achieve in times of crisis.

The pandemic has shown us that not all members of the population are affected by COVID-19 equally. The risk of severe illness from COVID-19 increases with age and underlying medical conditions; some placements for social workers, for example, require students to work with vulnerable, older individuals. Thus, placements should consider the circumstances of the individuals they serve and waive the requirement of in-person placements.

While placements are important for assisting students with their transition into the workforce, students should not be required to complete inperson placements in an environment that is not conducive to learning. In this time of crisis, virtual learning would alleviate the added stress and anxiety of contracting COVD-19. Furthermore, graduate students are students, not workers. Thus, the priority should be to equip them with the fundamental knowledge needed to be successful in their field.

Ashley Mutasa is a third-year neuroscience and statistics student at UTM.

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NOVEMBER 23, 2020

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U of T — investment transparency is essential for climate justice U of T is operating under a diet of passive actions and futile promises

Alex Levesque Columnist

Because of the Temerty Foundation’s recent $250 million donation to U of T, a light has been cast on U of T’s investment status — specifically, on its continued fossil fuel sponsorship.

While U of T President Meric Gertler may continue to characterize the climate crisis as “one of the most urgent challenges facing our world,” the pressing nature of the issue has not been translated into proactive actions.

As a self-proclaimed climate leader, U of T should not be downplaying the urgency of the climate crisis by censoring investments.

In October 2019, Leap UofT, a student-led climate advocacy group, filed a Freedom of Information request asking the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) to reveal its investments, as UTAM currently manages over $10 billion in assets.

Under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, people have the right to request information from public institutions like U of T. Sydney Gram, a fourth-year life science student and a member of Leap UofT, claimed in an email to The Varsity that UTAM refused to divulge its investment information for two reasons.

Gram wrote that UTAM was concerned that “making U of T’s investment details public could make the university less competitive in the investment market,” and that UTAM wished

to avoid the “financial cost and effort required to dig up [investment] information.”

These are not reasons; they are excuses. After all, U of T is one of the top ranked universities in Canada, which suggests that they have the resources to fulfill Leap UofT’s request. By denying this request, UTAM illustrates that its priorities are directed toward their investors and their investors alone. This a classic demonstration of bureaucratic laziness.

On behalf of Leap UofT, Gram questioned UTAM’s reasoning. UTAM’s own 2019 Annual Report indicates that acquiring investment information is not an arduous task because it expects “a great deal of transparency from potential and current managers.”

Although the reason behind the university’s obscurity is not concretely known, its continued investment in the fossil fuel industry could serve as a possible explanation.

In an email to The Varsity, Paul Downes, a professor of English and American literature at U of T and a member of Divestment and Beyond, characterized U of T’s lack of transparency as a “betrayal of public trust,” reasoning that “U of T is a public university and the formal agree-

ISOBEL HEINTZMAN/THEVARSITY

ments and investment strategies associated with all donations should be made fully public.”

Regarding transparency as an allconsuming chore rather than an obligation not only characterizes the university as dismissive of the climate crisis but,

frankly, as an institutional body that severely lacks the institutional humility that is essential to climate advocacy efforts. However, revealing the university’s investments could present U of T in an even more unfavourable light.

For example, Divestment and Beyond — a coalition of U of T faculty, staff, and students advocating for climate justice — has been particularly vocal in its disapproval of the university’s recent “landmark” charter. The document titled “Investing to Address Climate Change” was signed by 15 Canadian universities and commits them to investing responsibly with respect to the climate crisis.

In a letter to U of T, the group wrote that the charter “shamefully echoes Alberta’s cynical climate plan of the early 2000s” with no firm strategies as to how the university will achieve “responsible investing.”

UTAM is a founding member of Climate Action 100+, a five-year plan created by investors to move toward a clean energy transition. In these kinds of initiatives, UTAM investment managers have acted on the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) guidelines, a set of principles that aim to facilitate more responsible investment strategies among investors.

Gram noted that “The University’s focus on ESG factors over more substantive forms of action [such as divestment]… is itself a huge lapse of transparency.”

In adherence to ESG principles, UTAM promised to reduce its carbon footprint of endowment and pension investment portfolios by at least 40 per cent by 2030. Daren Smith, UTAM’s president, claimed that U of T’s targets were a “highly effective way to address the risks and opportunities related to climate change.”

However, in UTAM’s 2019 Guiding Principles report, the language used was vague. For instance, the document noted that U of T’s involvement with Climate Action 100+ characterizes it as a member of “active participants in encouraging companies to recognize and address carbon

risk in the management of their operations.”

With this in mind, one might ask themselves where U of T’s true motivations lie during the current climate crisis. U of T seems insistent on fortifying a barrier between the public and itself, a clear indicator that the university is not as dedicated to climate action as it claims to be.

However, the lack of a firm plan might not be an accident. The lack of transparency can lead one to believe that U of T’s actions are tied to the very fact that the fossil fuel industry has been a profitable investment for centuries.

Frankly, putting a cover over investments is a major infringement of the university’s responsibilities as a public institution. Universities that handle millions of dollars in endowments have a responsibility as large institutional entities to make their investments public. After all, supposedly operating in favour of climate justice requires an intersectional approach that values collaboration with different voices from various sects of the community.

“The only way that U of T can challenge the domination of the fossil fuel industry is to refuse to fund themnot because this would make fossil fuel companies go bankrupt, but because as a top-ranked educational institution, U of T has enormous power in defining what is morally and intellectually acceptable,” wrote Gram. By refusing to divulge information, the university actively rejects its responsibility to do so.

U of T is engaging in a diet of passive actions and futile promises. What it hopes to achieve with this smokeand-mirrors act is unclear. Regardless, if the university continues to refuse to be transparent about their investments, it has no right to be called a climate leader.

Alex Lévesque is a second-year social sciences student at University College.

He is the comment section’s climate crisis columnist.

10

THE VARSITY

FEATURES

From muted rehearsals to plexiglass barriers — how the pandemic has overhauled the Faculty of Music One of U of T’s smallest faculties was hit hardest by move to virtual learning

Stephanie Bai Features Editor

On March 13 — before U of T President Meric Gertler sent the announcement that U of T would be calling off all in-person classes — Benjamin Storm, a third-year student majoring in trombone performance, was sitting in the Geiger-Torel Room at the Faculty of Music, trying to work through a piece he had never seen before.

This Friday in particular had been relatively unremarkable for him. In the trombone class he had attended before, he had heard rumours that this could be the last class they had together, but there hadn’t been any definite decisions yet.

Storm recalled how, even with the pandemic looming above them, it still felt good to be playing a new piece with other students.

“You’re all reading together and kind of figuring something out together and really trying to make the most of something that you’ve never seen before,” he said. “It can feel really collaborative and satisfying to see that really, really work.”

At the end of the rehearsal, Storm remembered his conductor saying that this might be the last time they would all meet. He thanked them for a good year and told them to take the

pandemic seriously.

When Storm walked out of his orchestra rehearsal, he didn’t know that this would be one of the last times that year he would be playing in a room full of people without masks or plexiglass barriers. He didn’t know that later in the afternoon, through Gertler’s announcement, his in-person exams would be cancelled, and the performances he had been preparing for would be postponed indefinitely.

And he didn’t know that after March 13, as students gradually left campus and didn’t return in the fall, his U of T experience — along with many other music students’ — would be fundamentally changed.

“There’s no other faculty that can really compare to the difference… that the Faculty of Music is going through,” Storm said.

A virtual approach to a hands-on education On Saturday afternoons over the summer, Alana Ng, a fourth-year student studying music education as a flute major, angled her laptop on a chair so her student could see her hands on the piano. This has been a typical setup for Ng since the pandemic hit, as she has had to video call her elementary school students for music lessons. The student she was teaching that Saturday was new, and Ng was going over the ba-

sics while adapting to the online format.

Communication was one of the most notable barriers to Ng as an instructor. Little details had to be explained carefully, such as telling beginner students which bar to start playing from or how to curve their fingers properly and press the keys.

“I think the rate of improvement, or just what you can teach, is a lot slower than in person, when you can demonstrate or show them more clearly,” Ng said.

The Faculty of Music’s transition to online learning has yielded similar effects for those on the receiving end of lessons. Ng characterized her pre-pandemic student experience as very hands-on and practical.

“We would take trips to schools, or schools would come to U of T, and we would do workshops with them or just take turns teaching each other in the class,” Ng said. “When [COVID-19] hit, obviously, we [couldn’t] do that anymore.”

Instead, labs and projects turned into written or video-based assignments. “It’s definitely less useful in terms of skill because we didn’t get to practice teaching or practice conducting in the way that is the best,” Ng said.

This year, like most faculties, the music faculty had originally planned a mix of course deliv-

The Faculty of Music building is hauntingly empty.

SAMANTHA YAO/THEVARSITY

ery options such as online synchronous, online asynchronous, and in person, which includes hybrid classes that allow some students to attend in person during certain times.

According to the Faculty of Music’s guide for incoming students in 2020–2021, yearlong and winter courses had been intended to be delivered in person. However, given the spike in Toronto’s COVID-19 cases, the Faculty of Music wrote to The Varsity that academic courses will be delivered online next semester.

Even before the school year began, classes originally scheduled to be in person switched to online. Ng noted that over the summer, she thought around half of her classes would be in person, but now, a large majority of them are virtual. Some courses have changed delivery methods with very short notice as well. One of Ng’s classes was moved online only two days before the class started.

Gabrielle Turgeon, a third-year student studying vocal performance, had also expected most of her classes to have an in-person element in July. But by the time the semester started, most of those classes had moved online as well.

“I’m already moved into a new place, and I’m already locked into a lease,” Turgeon said. “But I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I am just happy to have some semblance of what feels like my life back.”

These morsels of normalcy have been few and far in between. Other sweeping changes have been introduced, such as the entire ensemble process. The ensemble experience is crucial for music students because it trains them for their future careers, as many may go on to collaborate with other players in professional ensembles.

However, this summer, rather than holding blind live auditions, students had to send in a taped audition instead. Storm found that certain factors could present major challenges. “If you have really terrible mic quality, and then just everything is distorted, it’s going to be really hard for the panel to be able to tell how you actually play,” he said.

Students could then be placed in an ensemble that they don’t suit. Storm’s observation about the importance of recording quality also reflected the current mounting expenses for music students.

Although these costs may be potentially offset by the faculty’s reduction in tuition fees this academic year, recording and editing highquality audio require specific equipment.

In the Faculty of Music’s guides for incoming and returning students, it strongly advised that students have access to an external USB microphone, which costs at least $120 to $150, and high-quality headphones, which easily run upward of $100. First-year students in certain majors are also recommended to have an electronic piano keyboard, which goes for around $100 or more.

Current ensemble rehearsals are unrecognizable compared to pre-pandemic times as well.

Since it’s impossible for so many students to be

features@thevarsity.ca

How do in-person classes compare?

When Storm enters the Macmillan Theatre for his brass quintet rehearsal, he has a specific routine in mind. He sanitizes his hands, goes through one of the stage doors on the upper basement level, and walks onto the stage with his mask on.

Only when he reaches his seat can he remove his mask. Between him and the other players, the stage is divided by large sheets of framed plexiglass that form make-shift barriers between them while allowing students to see each other.

“It’s a bit more difficult, especially in something like a brass quintet scenario,” Storm said. “It’s harder to hear each other, especially since you’re so spread out, and you’ve got barriers in between you. And then it’s also a bit harder to see each other.”

Although this might affect the quintet’s playing, he’s glad to have the in-person opportunity. “Ultimately, it feels a bit refreshing to actually be playing with other people again,” he said.

The Faculty of Music also has specific safety measures in place for in-person rehearsals.

After each brass quintet finishes up in Macmillan Theatre, the janitorial staff wipe down the barriers, switch out the music stands, and sanitize everywhere.

“It really feels like we’re doing all that we can in order to prevent the spread of [COVID-19],” Storm said. “I feel pretty comfortable with the whole thing so far.”

Aside from these rehearsals, Storm also has in-person lessons. He noted that they aren’t very different from previous years, although he does have to play for his teacher from the opposite corner of the room.

For those with online lessons, like Turgeon, lesson quality depends primarily on the instructors. Turgeon initially had reservations about virtual lessons because. For a vocal performance student, in-person guidance can be especially useful.

“I think with singing it’s more common to have that physical component because singing is an instrument where you can’t see the mechanisms,” Turgeon said. “It’s more based on feeling.”

As a result, singing involves a very physical component that is difficult to replicate online. In person, when a teacher demonstrates certain breathing techniques, they might ask students to feel their diaphragm. Sometimes Turgeon’s teacher had to hold her neck in place for proper alignment as well.

However, Turgeon found that her virtual lessons have exceeded her expectations.

“Given that they’re online, they’re still really

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in one room given physical distancing restrictions, all rehearsals are completely virtual.

Although the Faculty of Music officially lists ensembles as in-person hybrid sessions, Ng and Turgeon both said that their respective ensembles haven’t met in person yet. The Faculty of Music’s told The Varsity that large ensembles are confirmed to be only online next semester.

According to Storm, who is in the UT Symphony Orchestra, his conductor uses rehearsals to show videos of other professional orchestras. Then, students are sent to breakout rooms to discuss those performances. There’s usually no playing involved.

“All of us are really wishing that we could have that hands-on experience and play,” Storm said. “Several times on the call, the conductor said, ‘This really isn’t ideal.’”

His roommates, who are in Wind Ensemble, had a muted rehearsal the other day, where they all played their instruments but couldn’t hear each other. Though this allowed them to play, being muted mitigated the key experience of collaboration that ensembles provide.

“We’ll take it for what it is — I think we all kind of understand that,” Storm said.

Regardless, playing music in an ensemble is an experience that cannot be replicated or repackaged.

“Analyzing videos is good to a certain extent,” Storm said. “But yeah… there isn’t much of a substitute. It doesn’t really measure up.”

good, which is amazing,” she said. “Even though [my teacher] probably can’t hear exactly what my voice would sound like if she was in the room with me, I feel like she’s still able to really hone in on what I’m doing wrong.”

Her positive experience can be partially attributed to her prior experience as a thirdyear student. She had been working with her teacher for two years prior, which she considered to be an advantage that first-year students may not have because they have to adjust to an entirely new teacher and course delivery method.

“I know her style… whereas when I was in first year, she was a new teacher for me, and that was harder,” Turgeon said. “I can’t imagine that for first-years who are coming into this year, online.

That’s probably harder for them than it is for me.”

The overhaul of the Faculty of Music experience for students Before the pandemic, on any given day, you would see people running around the Faculty of Music lobby. Students would likely bump into professors while waiting in line for the café, and on the third floor, people sat on couches and chatted in between classes about music.

Now, it’s a ghost town. When Storm walks into the faculty, he only sees a few people sitting distanced in the lobby, keeping to themselves.

“It’s totally dead,” he said. “It’s kind of depressing.”

Although he’s noticed that some people are more talkative during online orchestra rehearsals, he knows that it doesn’t entirely match up to his experience the years before.

While many faculties have seen their facilities depleted of student socialization, the Faculty of Music is known to be an especially close-knit group. Being one of the smallest faculties on campus, students typically see the same people repeatedly on campus.

“Everyone knows everyone basically — at least in your year,” Storm said.

Nevertheless, Turgeon observed that through the pandemic, the general feeling of closeness among students has survived. “We’re still a big family,” she said. “It’s nice that we’re all going through this together — this experience of doing Zoom music school.”

The transition to virtual gatherings has also impacted music clubs, such as Surround Sound,

Keyboards run upward of $100.

SAMANTHA YAO/THEVARSITY

a student acapella group. In order to follow physical distancing restrictions, the group has taken to rehearsing outside at a Faculty of Music courtyard with masks on.

“This gives us some shelter from the wind and an easy, on-campus meeting spot each week, and we’ve found it to work quite well so far,” Abby Chase, a fourth-year student studying book and media studies, English, and creative expression and society, wrote in an email to The Varsity. As the president of Surround Sound, she has been especially focused on how to best transition the group from in person to online.

Although she expressed some frustration at the Faculty of Music’s responsiveness to the pandemic, citing a lack of reliable information and safety guidelines for groups like hers, she is trying to preserve the in-person element of acapella as long as possible.

“We will likely have to move virtual once the temperature hits freezing, with the increased restrictions in Toronto, but for now, we are enjoying the chance to sing in person however we can,” she wrote.

However, even though clubs have hosted picnics and rehearsals have helped members bond, COVID-19 restrictions have undoubtedly altered how clubs can interact, especially music clubs like Surround Sound that rely on the creative and collaborative experience of singing together.

“We can replicate a lot of the musical side of the group outside, but it’s much more challenging to safely plan socials, so that has impacted the group a lot,” Chase wrote.

Another aspect of student life that has been indelibly affected by the pandemic is networking.

Turgeon spoke about how limited socialization has impacted a vital part of music students’ experiences this year. “[For] every friend you make at the Faculty of Music, in a sense you’re networking because they’re your friend, but also in the future, you might collaborate with them,” Turgeon said.

“In the future, they might be a conductor,

or they might be a director… you never know how the people you know will influence the career you have.”

Beyond the LinkedIn quality of making connections at the faculty, Turgeon also noted that at the end of the day, she misses the people the most. Storm seconds this opinion.

As both of them are performance majors, the specific style of education they chose at U of T is dependent on being around people and creating something alive and ephemeral for an audience and with each other.

“Whenever a family [member] or friend asks me why I went into a performance stream in the faculty and maybe not an academic stream, it’s just because I love performing,” Storm said.

It is uncertain if Storm and Turgeon will get the opportunity to perform next semester. The Faculty of Music wrote to The Varsity that currently, recitals and juries — which are final performance exams — are intended to be delivered in person in the winter term, but that is subject to change.

For now, although recorded auditions and recitals may give students multiple tries to perfect their final take, there is an irreproducible quality of being given one shot, one moment, to get it right.

“I don’t know what the word is,” Turgeon said.

“But when it’s a live performance, there’s a kind of excitement to knowing that maybe someone’s going to make a mistake. That kind of adds to the performance — it adds to the rawness and realness.”

As a singer, she found that the experience of being on a stage is irreplaceable compared to the limitations of online learning.

“As a performer, I feel so much more energized in the way that I’m able to express myself when there’s actual physical people watching me,” she said. “I kind of feed off of it — I feed off of that energy.”

Recording herself instead is entirely different. “It doesn’t feel the same… you’re just making a video,” she said. “You’re not actually performing for people.” ing a video,” she said. “You’re not actually performing for people.”

Arts & Culture

November 23, 2020 var.st/arts arts@thevarsity.ca

How do U of T student artists hone their craft?

Four creatives on balancing school, overcoming fear of failure, lessons learned in 2020 follow. I do my best to give time to my art during the school year, but I cannot go long without experimenting with artistic outlets. It is meditation and a release.

Chloe Kim Varsity Contributor

What keeps us from creating art? Some people may genuinely be disinterested in creating; however, there are still hurdles to overcome for those who want to create but still don’t.

Some fall under the pressure of time, while others may fear judgment from peers. Consequently, creating art serves us an irony: although creating art intends to be freeing through personal expression, it can be constraining due to the stresses it brings.

This is especially true in an environment like U of T, where academic responsibilities must be carefully juggled with any other activities. How, then, can we successfully be student artists?

Although being an artist on an academically inclined campus is difficult, it is possible. I’ve come across some talented people who are very passionate about creating, even during the school year.

To better understand how U of T students can create despite student stresses, The Varsity interviewed Erich Mayerhofer, Karooni Ahmed, Amy Lee, and Imaan Rajan, who each provided personal insight about how they carry out their creative processes while being students.

The creators Aside from being an articulate film student in class, Mayerhofer is a budding screenwriter with a passion for art films. He can be found on Twitter @ erichwashere, where he shares his personal updates and opinions on the film world.

Ahmed is a graphic artist with a growing social media following on his Instagram account, @ madqaps. He currently shares work that pays homage to pop culture’s best album covers and will soon be releasing prints of his work.

Lee is a dancer who has been involved with many distinguished hip-hop and modern dance studios in Seoul and Toronto since she was in her early teens.

She frequently posts videos of her own choreogra-

phy and collaborations with other dancers on her Instagram account, @aims_lee.

Rajan, who can be found on her Instagram account, @imaanrajan, is the creator and editor-inchief of the online multimedia collective RANI Creative, which serves and represents underrepresented artists. She also enjoys exploring many artistic media including singing, poetry, and photography.

The Varsity: How do you balance your schoolwork and art?

Erich Mayerhofer: I like to treat my personal work as kind of a break from schoolwork. Often, I find myself getting mentally exhausted from all of the material in university, and it helps me to just reroute my thinking elsewhere for a bit. To be honest, I do some of my best thinking and writing when I should be doing something else.

Karooni Ahmed: Honestly, it’s just about how badly you want it. I make the time for it by cutting out most distractions. I cut out video games, watching Netflix, and used that time to paint. It’s also about passion.

Drawing has become a part of my daily routine, and I feel restless without it. I’d have the same feeling someone else would have if they didn’t watch an episode of their favorite show.

It’s therapeutic for me; in fact, it helps me deal with the stress a student typically goes through in university.

Amy Lee: It’s always difficult to find time for my art when I have school. So, I try to go with the mindset: instead of finding time, make time. It’s also a source of stress relief for me, so I kind of have to dance. Even if it’s just a quick freestyle.

Imaan Rajan: As a student with heavy ADHD and anxiety, incorporating artistic outlets into my week, in any form, is vital to my wellbeing. I am constantly restless and seeking new media to uncover. My favourites are photography, singing, and poetry.

Because of this, my individual creative outlets do not follow a set plan. They come from emotions I am feeling or the threads of passion that I want to

TV: How do you overcome the fear of failure when it comes to the reception of your art?

EM: Failure is honestly such a healthy tool for improvement, I think. Whenever I show people my writing, even technical writing not associated with screenwriting, I try to make note of everything they didn’t like.

Sometimes it stings when something you personally enjoyed isn’t received that well, but ultimately, screenwriting is more about the audience than it is about the writer. I’ll admit it’s hard to get past failure, but — without being too cliché — it truly does make you better at what you do.

KA: You have to be your own biggest fan. Of course, not everyone will love your artwork; only if you see your artwork as a failure can it indeed be titled as a failure. You have to see every artwork you create as a stepping stone, take what you think applies to you from criticism, and evolve instead of dwelling on the past.

AL: My art is my art. Of course, I have moments where I have my doubts. In those moments, I just remind myself that what I put out there is for me, and not for anyone else. If other people can relate or find it entertaining, great. If they don’t, then so be it.

If I continuously fear the way people perceive me and my work, then I will never put anything out there. As long as I stay true to myself, people who like my work will support me and people who don’t like it will not. That’s how art has always been.

IR: We live in a digital age where artists are constantly being evaluated and forced to prove themselves. With an increasing dependence on the ‘likes’ from their digital audience, not getting the response one wants can shatter an artist and stunt their growth.

I often find myself in this bind, only considering my art sufficient if it has received a certain

number of likes, rather than how it individually touched someone. At some point, you have to have a conversation with yourself about why you’re creating something: is it for the reception of your audience or to feed your soul?

It could be both, but the latter must be prioritized first. There must always be passion behind your creation.

TV: What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned about creating in 2020?

EM: A habit I already had, before everything 2020 brought, was keeping an idea in my head too long without acting on it. I found — and still find — myself picking apart ideas before they even reach the page. Some ideas that perhaps may have been good died before even getting the light of day just because of my own criticisms.

A situation like lockdown only made that habit worse, but it also gave me reason to improve that aspect of myself. Nowadays if I have an idea, I try and get it on paper as soon as possible. That way, I can let it sit for a while, maybe come back to it, and ultimately judge it more objectively. I guess I’m trying to become less like my own biggest critic.

KA: I learned how time management and consistency play into creative potential. Harmony between the two can genuinely result in outstanding results.

AL: I am, at my very core, a dancer. So as much as I do enjoy creating, I also enjoy being a part of the projects of other creatives around me.

One thing I’ve learned is that I should always be a student before being a teacher. My goal is to learn from all the beautiful and talented people around me so that I can continue to be inspired and grow as a creator myself.

IR: Surround yourself with other creatives. I catch myself comparing my art to the work of artists who end up on my feed. Because of social media, imposter syndrome is at its peak. I’ve learned to foster a community of the artists I admire and fellow creatives.

In my first year of university, I created an online multimedia collective, RANI Creative, that serves and represents underrepresented artists — Rani means ‘queen’ in Hindi, paying tribute to my culture. This community has allowed me to develop my craft as a minoritized artist and leader.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

GLADYS LOU/THE VARSITY

var.st/arts

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

13

Study abroad cancellations: packed up with nowhere to go Students discuss abandoning their travel plans in light of COVID-19

Ambika Maharaj Varsity Contributor

I was all ready for my summer abroad. I’d carefully planned out my entire summer — I would take two courses during the May to June semester, fly home for two weeks, and then be off to England in August.

The course I’d enrolled in was perfect — a course on Shakespeare that featured opportunities to see his plays performed on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe and at his birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon.

A chance to see England in the summer, to make new friends, perhaps even travel to nearby European countries, all while completing an entire credit toward my major at the world-renowned University of Oxford — it was almost too good to be true.

When the outbreak of COVID-19 forced the closure of international borders, or at least the reduction of travel, it brought with it the cancellation of all learning abroad opportunities at the University of Toronto until at least April 30, 2021.

This meant that students — many of whom had already applied, been accepted into their chosen program, paid fees, and made the necessary preparations to embark upon such an adventure — were thrown into a tailspin.

These cancellations were not entirely unexpected; rather, it was a drawn-out process of waiting to hear the bad news. I spoke with four students who have had their study abroad plans cancelled to find out where they intended to go, how they felt about the cancellation, and their plans for the future.

The dawning realization and consequent disappointment Brooklynn Hambly, a third-year history specialist at UTSG who was supposed to do a summer abroad at Oxford, wrote, “As it was all starting, I didn’t think

the August stuff was going to get cancelled since I didn’t really think it would get as bad as it did back in February. As it got closer, I wasn’t shocked about it.”

Indeed, it seemed inevitable when the number of COVID-19 cases skyrocketed, causing the delivery of in-person classes to be cancelled.

Despite this, the decision was one that led to severe disappointment. For many students, like Emad Ahmed, learning abroad had been a dream. Ahmed, a third-year student at Rotman Commerce, wrote, “Going on exchange for a semester was one of the things I 100% wanted to do in my undergrad at U of T. Submitting the application for my semester abroad was something I was waiting for before I even started my first year of studies.”

Study abroad programs typically involve a placement at a foreign university that the University of Toronto has partnered with. The programs allow students to complete a summer course, or an entire semester’s worth of studies, at the partner university, sometimes whilst under the tutelage of professors from that university.

To top it all off, any courses completed can be counted toward a University of Toronto degree.

However, these opportunities meant so much more to students than simply a learning experience. For some, like Hambly, it meant an opportunity to visit where her great grandmother lived before coming to Canada. For others, including Ahmed who has been in the GTA “[his] entire life,” it meant a chance to travel.

Lost experiences and learning setbacks When asked which experiences they most regretted being deprived of, Jerry Shin, a third-year student in the peace, conflict and justice program, lamented

Grounded airplanes mean that the possibility of studying in England, Italy, or Ireland for the summer or year is gone.

NATHAN CHING/THE VARSITY

the loss of their trip to Italy. “What an experience to miss. It actually kills me,” Shin wrote. “It would have been the perfect school year, the most beautiful places, the best food!” Aadithya Thulasingam, a third-year international relations major, wrote that he regrets missing out on being able to drink some pints in Dublin.

For upper-year students, the cancellation of these learning abroad programs may also mean that they will not be able to partake in such a venture before they graduate. Thulasingam wrote, “I’ve definitely kept coming back to how much I was looking forward to a really exciting life experience and how uncertain it is that I’ll be able to do it during my undergrad years.”

Aside from this, there have also been academic repercussions. For some students, doing a summer or semester abroad enabled them to catch up on credits they needed or, in some cases, get ahead.

In light of these plans being nullified, many have had to make alterations to their academic plans going forward. These include picking up extra courses during the fall 2020 and winter 2021 academic sessions.

Some students, like Hambly and Thulasingam, are up to six courses in a single semester.

Future travel plans?

When asked if they would be open to re-applying in the future, should the opportunity present itself once more, the response was a resounding ‘yes.’ Despite this, many still harbour hesitations in light of the hazards still posed by the pandemic.

“At this point,” wrote Shin, “the number one factor is safety. Would I love to go? Of course! But my family would be wondering where I was and if I was safe all the time. It would be cruel in a way to put them through that. This whole situation stings.”

Overall, most of the students affected admit that cancelling study abroad programs was the only way forward during these unprecedented times. Cases of COVID-19 in Canada have since climbed to over 320,000, and many foreign countries, including some locations for study abroad, have surpassed that.

The cancellation was a matter of international safety. Nonetheless, it was a crushing blow. Ahmed sums up the feelings of his fellow study-abroad students nicely: “I had a feeling it was going to happen, but it sucks that this one dream I had for 3 years just kind of crumbled. I was going to my ideal destination, at the ideal time of my degree, but because of COVID, that dream fizzled out.”

Overlooked: A brief foray into the breathtaking world of Lavie Tidhar The cornerstone of modern fantasy that you have never heard of Radmila Yarovaya Varsity Contributor

Confession: in a parallel reality not unlike this one, there exists a version of myself who didn’t click on one of the hundreds of recommended book lists littering her feed, didn’t stumble upon the best book that she would ever read, didn’t spend months tracking it down through online vendors, and didn’t become obsessed with the works of author Lavie Tidhar. I shudder at the very notion. I hope the multiverse can forgive my sins.

There are few books on my overcrowded shelves for which I have the same level of reverence and warmth as a 2013 work of speculative historical fiction inconspicuously titled The Violent Century, in which we follow a band of artificially created superhumans as they plunge into and become witnesses to the military conflicts of the past century.

Maybe it was the non-linear plot structure.

Maybe it was the complex questions of life — ‘what does it take to be a hero?’ — being asked in simple ways amid a fantastical environment.

Maybe it was the diversity and nuance of characters. Maybe it was Tidhar’s poetic words disguised as fiction. Whatever it was, I emerged out of my reading stupor intoxicated, bewitched, and slightly in love.

What followed was a binge of nearly all Tidhar’s books that I could get my hands on, such as The Bookman series. Set in a Victorian, steampunk, alternate history, the books’ world is ruled by the British Lizardine Empire where all myths and legendary characters are real.

Various characters set out on a quest to find the mysterious ‘Bookman,’ who seems to hold the key to the eccentricities of this world and is at the centre of all of its secrets and lies. Protagonists include Milady de Winter, Gilgamesh, and Victor Hugo.

Then there was Osama, for which the author received the World Fantasy Award. The book follows a private detective as he tracks down the author of pulp fiction novels featuring fictional terrorist Osama Bin Laden.

When I was done, one question wouldn’t stop nagging at me: why was this guy not more famous? I felt like I was part of a great big hoax, and at any moment, Tidhar’s work would be revealed as a great phenomenon of pop-cultural literary acclaim — and I would be the last simpleton who hadn’t known who he was. Cue the off-camera laugh track.

The best way that I can describe Tidhar is that he is Neil Gaiman if you were to replace gothic with science fiction. Both straddle the line between reality and legend; both create the most intricate ecosystems; both twist pop culture and produce characters to whom we can almost draw real world parallels; both plunge their readers into an uncanny valley.

However, one is the most well-known fantasy author of our generation, and the other’s books have to be ordered almost exclusively online because brick-and-mortar businesses cannot make the space. I’ll let you put down wagers as to who is who.

In a world where the speculative and metaphysical are being brought into the public’s view more and more — such as the massively successful Spider-Man into the Spider-verse, screen adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s work in The Man in the High Castle and Electric Dreams, and the oversaturation of superhero content giving way for counter-narratives like Amazon’s The Boys — it seems like the awe-inspiring workings of Tidhar’s mind should fit right in.

So I encourage, implore, and beg you to do yourself a favour and discover the best fantasy author of this generation before it is too late — before producers catch on, capitalize on Tidhar’s world, and inevitably squander its magic.

FIONA TUNG/THE VARSITY

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ARTS & CULTURE

arts@thevarsity.ca

Guilty Pleasures: Twilight is good, despite what the critics say Soundtrack, cinematography, acting make this film a worthwhile watch

Ciera Couto Varsity Contributor

Nostalgia is a powerful force. It gives us the urge to revisit things from our past, like films, regardless of how they were regarded critically.

In speaking to people my age about films we find ourselves constantly revisiting, I find that nostalgia seemed to always play a part in our choices. Films are memories; they bring us comfort, make us feel good, and we grow more appreciative of them with every re-watch.

Nostalgia, although not the only factor, is what often brings me back to my guilty pleasure — Twilight.

Twilight was first released in 2008. I was nine years old and probably too young to watch a movie about a somewhat intense love triangle between a human girl and two different supernatural creatures.

I watched it anyway and fell in love — my biggest worry at nine years old was whether or not Bella was going to even survive the first movie.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve realized that the Twilight films are not exactly critically acclaimed and are often mocked. I revisit those films every year regardless; I love them — and I have good reasons outside of nostalgia, especially concerning the first film.

I’d like to start by noting that I am not the only person who loves Twilight. It is globally the 14th highest-grossing film directed by a woman — I still believe that Catherine Hardwicke should have directed all of the films in the saga.

Twilight captures everything that is embarrassingly good about the late 2000s: film adaptations of young adult novels, overt obsessions with the supernatural, and lines like, “You better hold on tight, spider monkey” making the final cut of a film.

So, yes, Twilight reminds me of that specific time in my life and is an ultimate comfort film, but every time I re-watch it, I find more things that I appreciate about it.

The soundtrack itself is something that most fans of the film are particularly proud of, and

this can be said for every film in the saga. Twilight has an amazing soundtrack — you cannot deny this. The tracklist included two Paramore songs, Iron & Wine, and featured Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole” playing over the iconic baseball scene. Yes, the movie showcased vampires playing baseball in a thunderstorm to a Muse song.

Another thing I will say in Twilight’s defence is that the cinematography is outstanding. It’s beautiful. There is a slight blue tint that falls over the entire film — which I’m sure has been mocked by ‘film bros several times — yet, if I could, I would have my life play out in that same tint.

Any shot of Edward and Bella laying in the meadow was actually shot on a golf course in Los Angeles, yet we see this beautiful, majestic field full of blues and purples. It’s spectacular and something the other films in the saga lost once Catherine Hardwicke was no longer directing.

People also love to criticize the performances

FIONA TUNG/THEVARSITY

in Twilight, but I’ll defend them by saying this: Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are brilliant actors and did the absolute best they could given the dialogue they were working with. Go back and watch Twilight and you’ll realize they play Edward and Bella perfectly, even though the roles came down to a telepathic vampire who is over 100 years old and a teenage girl who is blindly in love with him.

Twilight is good — and it’s not just the nostalgia talking.

This virtual conference featured industry professionals who spoke about career cultivation with a musical twist..

TOSIN MAIYEGUN/THE VARSITY

Hart House’s “Humanz of Hip Hop” syncs passion with practicality Three professionals on career building, networking, overcoming challenges

Varsha Pillai Varsity Contributor

“Humanz of Hip Hop,” facilitated by Hart House, is a program built to provide a look into the world of hip hop and career fields that intersect with hiphop music and culture.

It offers students a rare opportunity to meet with people who are active members of the Canadian hip-hop community, and recognizes that hip hop is built of a connective spirit that has been able to give space to marginalized communities’ voices and function as an educational tool.

The program was held online on November 4 and 5, with the first day focusing on “Voices of Revolution” and the second on “Career Stories.”

The second day, in particular, had an interesting conversation surrounding passions, plans, and career paths relating to hip hop.

The three speakers, Nadine Brown, Del Cowie, and Michael Prosserman, each brought noteworthy perspectives on finding a way to incorporate passion into a career field.

Brown, a sneaker industry expert, comes from a retail background that she incorporated with her international business degree. She went into the world of styling, further pushing her toward the sneaker industry as she was looking to try some-

thing new.

Cowie, a music journalist and editor, worked at a bank for many years but always had a deep love and appreciation for journalism. He was able to use this in his transition into the hip-hop world.

Lastly, Prosserman, an author and university instructor, was initially introduced to the hiphop community through ‘breaking,’ also known as breakdancing or b-boying. He used his love of breaking with his crew and his passion for helping others with mental health issues to found Unity Charity, which he built and grew for 15 years before moving away into the world of social enterprising. He now seeks to support non-profit leaders to breathe life into their own ideas.

All three speakers were wonderful and knowledgeable, and I was struck by how all were able to leave a similar message that would resonate with any student going through a postsecondary program. Each of them showed that there was no clear path, no direct road to the perfect career.

Although some may find a clear-cut path to their own version of success, it is essential for students to understand that for them to truly incorporate their talents and passions into a career path, they will have to make difficult and unnerving choices.

As all three pointed out, each person must look

at their own strengths and weaknesses and cultivate a strategy for success that is not based on someone else’s. For career cultivation, your feet will not fit into another’s shoes.

You also have to make sacrifices. As the head of a non-profit community, Prosserman was candid, saying that he was only able to pay himself fairly after nearly 10 years of building his organization.

In his case, there was a financial sacrifice to be made to pursue his passions, but the greater point is that each person, in order to find fulfillment in their career, may come across a time when they have to make a sacrifice to follow their passion.

Another essential aspect brought up was always keeping an open mind and not blocking yourself off from opportunities. Del, coming from a completely different background in banking, was able to use the skills from that experience and apply them to his journalistic endeavours.

Cowie noted that, for him, attention to detail was something from his five years in banking that he was able to carry over into a new field.

The last, but certainly not least, topic that Brown was able to touch on was the idea that we allow fear, difficulty, and sometimes ourselves to stand in the way of our own success. For her, entering the styling industry provided some challenges, particularly because of how tight-knit that world is.

Without networking, it may be hard to enter certain industries. “Sometimes it’s… about who you know, not necessarily what you know,” Brown said.

Networking helped her find her place in styling for the television industry. It is important to remember that building connections, even if you are scared to talk to others, is extremely important in getting your profile and work out into the world.

Brown also noted that although she is not a huge fan of talking, she is starting to push herself to do more of this thing that scares her. She mentioned that if she had not let fear limit her, she may have had a slightly different career path.

“Humanz of Hip Hop” was a wonderful opportunity to learn about career building, not only in the hip-hop world, but in general. The questions and answers were applicable to any field of study and were able to penetrate any sort of divide between the world of hip hop and other ‘normal’ jobs, such as running a business, working at the bank, or retail.

Whereas a lot of students have it ingrained in their heads that there is a sort of direct process to building a career, this program was able to switch the narrative and educate students in an honest and candid conversation to expose the realities of career planning and building.

Photocap.

TOSIN MAIYEGUN/THE VARSITY

Science

November 23, 2020 var.st/science science@thevarsity.ca

SARS-CoV-2 antibodies persist in blood and saliva for three months, finds U of T-affiliated study Shedding light on COVID-19 immune response over time

Hannah Nie Varsity Contributor

Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are continuing to find new insights into the mechanisms of the virus behind the disease, called SARS-CoV-2.

An October study published by researchers at U of T and Mount Sinai Hospital in the journal Science Immunology showed that SARS-CoV-2 antibodies can be detected in COVID-19 patients’ blood and saliva for up to three months after the first onset of symptoms. This indicates a sustained response to the viral infection. This study was also one of the first to investigate SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in saliva.

Saliva tests for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 are already widely available, and these results raise the possibility of also testing for COVID-19 immunity with saliva.

Antibody detection in the fight against COVID-19 Antibodies are an important part of the body’s immune response and can provide information about an individual’s immunity and stage of infection.

There are three main types of antibodies involved in COVID-19 antibody tests: IgG, IgA, and IgM. These antibodies can target specific viruses to help fight infection. For instance, anti-SARS-CoV-2 viruses bind to and “neutralize” proteins characteristic of the virus, inhibiting their function.

Jennifer Gommerman in U of T’s Department of Immunology and Anne-Claude Gringas at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute were senior authors of the paper. The Gingras Laboratory had been working with techniques in immunology and proteomics — the study of proteins — prior to the pandemic.

When COVID-19 hit, the lab made a swift transition to direct their resources and expertise to study blood and saliva antibodies for SARS-CoV-2.

The researchers detected SARS-CoV-2 antibodies using a standard procedure called an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, also used in HIV detection and some pregnancy tests. The researchers detected anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG, IgA, and IgM antibodies that were capable of binding

why we were seeing this IgA… response before the IgG response.”

Interestingly, Isho and her colleagues found that while the unexposed individuals — as expected — had low IgG and IgM antibodies against SARSCoV-2, a small percentage of uninfected individuals were found to have anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgA antibodies. The reason for this remains unclear and requires further research.

There was little evidence for the possibility of detecting virus antibodies in saliva before this study.

COURTESY OF FERNANDO ZHIMINAICELA/PIXABAY

and neutralizing specific viral proteins and measured their concentrations in blood and saliva.

Blood samples from 439 individuals and saliva from 128 individuals were collected over the course of 115 days and analyzed for their antibody levels over time. Three groups were compared: acute COVID-19 patients who were recently infected, patients who had recently recovered, and uninfected individuals who had never contracted COVID-19.

IgG antibodies detected up to three months after first onset of symptoms Anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG, IgA, and IgM antibodies were detected in COVID-19 patients, but only IgG antibodies persisted, while IgA and IgM decayed rapidly after infection. For most patients, IgG remained in both blood and saliva for up to 105 days after the first COVID-19 symptoms were reported.

The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 antibodies persist or decay over time has faced contradicting results from scientists, likely due to differences in research methodologies. In an interview with The Varsity, Gommerman said that it’s unclear

exactly how long COVID-19 immunity lasts, as studies are still ongoing and long-term data is not yet available.

Gommerman expressed that the persistence of IgG antibodies for three months thus far suggests a lasting immune response, during which reinfection is unlikely. “When a vaccine does come along, we’re going to make a strong robust antibody response to a vaccine,” she said. “And it’s not just going to die right away. It’s going to be a sustained antibody response.”

Some unexposed individuals found to possess SARS-CoV-2 antibodies Some aspects of the antibody response to SARSCoV-2 remain unclear. In an interview with The Varsity, co-author and PhD candidate Baweleta Isho describes early COVID-19 research, which found that the IgA response to the virus occurred before the IgG response, an unusual occurrence for viral infections.

“In a viral infection, normally we see the IgM response first, followed by an IgG response, and later on, we would see an IgA response,” Isho explained. “This is why we really wanted to explore

Antibody levels in saliva are reflective of antibodies in blood Previous research has demonstrated detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in blood and viral RNA in saliva; however, this study was one of the first to examine SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in saliva.

Saliva antibodies were found to be well-correlated with blood serum antibodies, especially for IgG. As such, saliva antibody tests could be developed as a convenient, non-invasive alternative to blood tests when assessing COVID-19 immunity.

“Since we found that IgG — and a lot of other papers have come out saying — that IgG is detectable up to six months post-symptom-onset, this would be a good way to determine the degree of immunity toward the virus that a certain population would have,” PhD candidate Michelle Zuo, another co-author of the paper, said in a Zoom interview with The Varsity.

“And since saliva is an easy biofluid to collect, this could be turned into home testing kits that we could send out to the population and just have them report the results. This way we would get a better grasp on who is actually developing a new response to the virus and might have had it already,” Zuo said.

Gommerman also noted that saliva tests could be particularly advantageous in circumstances where blood tests are difficult to obtain, for example in pediatrics.

However, a drawback of saliva tests is that antibody concentrations are typically lower in saliva than in blood. As such, sensitivity must be improved and tests must be standardized before saliva antibody tests can be used clinically or in home testing kits.

Do we really know what others think about us?

UTM researchers have the answer Forming metaperceptions — some people are better than others

Valeria Khudiakova Associate Science Editor

As humans, we are inherently social beings. Even if we claim not to care about what others think about us, we still want and need to fit into the social world, which can provide us with valuable personal and professional relationships and opportunities for growth. People are quick to form judgments and impressions about others, and those impressions can determine our status in our social groups.

This may be the reason why we are so interested in how other people see us, which leads us to try to gauge what impressions we leave on people we interact with. Research has shown that such judgments, known as metaperceptions, tend to be quite accurate.

A recent study led by U of T researchers found that some people are better at forming these metaperceptions than others. Researchers also discovered that it also matters whose impressions we are judging, as some people are more transparent than others.

It takes two to perceive We know that the cues we receive from other people can affect the accuracy of our metaper-

ceptions, but can both interaction partners play a role in metaperception accuracy? There might be something about the interaction dynamics that can affect metaperception accuracy, or meta-accuracy.

Erika Carlson, an assistant professor at UTM’s psychology department; Norhan Elsaadawy, a PhD student in Carlson’s lab; and Lauren Human of McGill University set out to answer that question.

The authors propose that there are three main sources of meta-accuracy: your general skill as a metaperceiver, as someone forming judgements about what other people think of you; the perceiver, or the person whose impression you are judging; and how both individuals interact. They conducted three studies involving more than 1,000 participants in total to test the role of each of those sources.

In the first of three separate studies, groups consisting of four to eight unacquainted undergraduates were given three minutes to get to know one another. Then, they provided impressions and metaperceptions of each member in a round-robin design.

The second study focused on a speed-dating event at a university bar, where participants shared their impressions and metaperceptions of each

person with whom they interacted.

In the final study, students enrolled in the same class were randomly divided into groups. The first meeting consisted of an ice-breaker activity, after which participants reported their self-perceptions, metaperceptions, and impressions of each group member.

Throughout the semester, the groups engaged in structured, in-class discussions about the lecture material. At their last meeting, participants reported their impressions of themselves and each group member as well as metaperceptions again.

The perceptions and metaperceptions were based on personality measures such as the Big Five Inventory, which is a test that breaks personality down into five dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability — also known as neuroticism — and openness. Interestingly, previous research has established that metaaccuracy for Big Five traits is higher than metaaccuracy for other traits, such as dominance.

Metaperception accuracy varies There was significant variance in meta-accuracy in all three studies, suggesting that some people are more skilled at making accurate metaperceptions.

The researchers also found evidence for positivity

and transparency bias in metaperceptions. In other words, some people tended to think that others saw them more positively and in ways more congruent with their own self-perceptions than they actually did.

The researchers caution that being a good metaperceiver does not make a person better at judging all impressions people have of them. The manner in which an accurate metaperception is formed is surprisingly subtle, making further research necessary.

For example, some people are more self-aware than others — and naturally better judges of how they are likely to be perceived — but others may simply be better at reading expressions from those perceiving them.

The effect of perceivers on meta-accuracy was small but still significant. This suggests that some people communicate their impressions a bit clearer than others.

Finally, in the first two studies, which focused on pairs, the interaction’s dynamics significantly affected meta-accuracy. This was more prevalent in one-on-one contexts than in group settings. Accordingly, the researchers propose that some group environments may prevent people from forming distinct impressions of other people.

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THE VARSITY

SCIENCE

science@thevarsity.ca

Despite long-term unknowns, the case against teenage vaping is growing Survey of country’s pediatricians highlights concerning rise in injuries, illnesses

Ryu Won Kang Varsity Contributor

Earlier this year, the first vaping-associated case of acute bronchiolitis, also known as popcorn lung, was shown to be associated with vape use in a 17-year-old Canadian individual. Since then, researchers have compiled an increasing body of evidence elucidating the harmful effects of vaping on the teenage body and brain.

Alongside her colleagues, Dr. Charlotte Moore-Hepburn, a U of T professor and pediatrician at The Hospital for Sick Children, conducted a preliminary public health surveillance study to get a glimpse of the current vaping-related injuries and illnesses found in Canada. A questionnaire was given out to practicing physicians of the Canadian Pediatric Society, 42 per cent of whom responded.

A similar study had been conducted four years prior, and the most shocking difference, said Moore-Hepburn, is the huge increase in cases over time. “Asking almost four years later, we’re seeing almost three times as many [cases],” she said in an interview with The Varsity.

Evidence for safe vaping unconvincing The study reported 88 cases of the most severe vaping-related injuries, which resulted in hospitalization or intensive care unit admission. It did not report on nicotine addiction following vape usage or the long-term effects on adolescent development.

Moore-Hepburn pointed out that other studies of appropriate research design, including prospective clinical studies and institutional-based research, are needed to answer these urgent and consequential questions. “[But] the absence of clear evidence of harm does not equal safety,” Moore-Hepburn said.

“There are a lot of unknowns… and young people shouldn’t vape.”

One argument that has pervaded the na-

tionwide conversation on the safety of vaping is that vaping is a less harmful and less dangerous alternative to traditional tobacco smoking, and that vaping can be used as a cessation device for smokers. However, the evidence supporting these claims is lacking.

“There really isn’t good evidence to support it being an effective tobacco cessation device… and we have no evidence to show that, over the long term, it’s safer than cigarette smoking,” Moore-Hepburn said. She also acknowledged that nicotine addiction is “incredibly challenging” to break, but suggested that teenagers who want to quit should turn to their health care providers instead of vaping.

Public health efforts are now pushing for the prohibition of any statements that may suggest comparative benefits of vaping in contrast with tobacco smoking. “The evidence simply is not there to suggest that [vapes] are better or even safe at baseline.”

Harmful flavouring additives Some of the further dangers surrounding vaping include the inclusion of nicotine in high concentrations as one of the key ingredients, as well as a

chemical compound known as diacetyl, one of several flavouring compounds that are added to enhance the appeal of vape products.

The dosage of nicotine in vaping liquid is high, even in comparison to smoking, making a vape “a much more effective nicotine delivery tool,” according to Moore-Hepburn. A highly addictive substance, nicotine has been shown to severely impact the cognitive capabilities of teenage brains, which continue to develop until the age of 25.

Flavouring compounds found in vape liquid also represent not only a health concern but also an ethical issue since the marketing of these vape liquids has been meant to appeal to younger audiences with the sale of flavours such as “pink cloud,” “key lime,” and “blue freeze.”

This may “unnecessarily draw young people to what could be a very hazardous product,” said Moore-Hepburn, and advocacy initiatives have started to be put into place to ban vaping products that are specially designed to be youthfriendly.

A survey reported 88 cases of hospitalization after a vapingrelated injury.

HAYDEN MAK /THEVARSITY

Should the vaping age be raised?

As vape products are relatively new to the market, especially compared to regular cigarettes, much work in the realms of research, education, and advocacy is needed and warranted, Moore-Hepburn maintained.

Progress has been made in the diagnosis of lung injury as a result of vaping, as one study involving 12 adolescents investigated the imaging results of these patients’ lungs. The images of the lungs of adolescent vapers showed severe, acute injuries, directly as a result of the inhalation of toxic chemicals.

Another timely piece to the vaping puzzle is that researchers have suggested that the sharing of vape devices can lead to a higher chance of COVID-19 transmission. This adds on another layer of risk to vaping.

Some advocacy efforts by the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation, for example, have strived for legislative change to raise the legal age to use vape products to 21 years old, up from the current legal age of 18 years old, as defined by the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act. However, others argue that changing the legal age is not as effective as the direct regulation of marketing and access to vape products.

“It is abundantly clear that it is far too easy for people considerably younger than 18 right now to get their hands on vaping products,” Moore-Hepburn said, adding that marketing to youth by vape manufacturers is a key aspect that advocates have been targeting. Other efforts have included attempting to lower the nicotine concentration that is allowed in vaping products, considering the slew of negative health consequences of the addictive chemical.

Although Moore-Hepburn stressed the need for more evidence on the long-term effects of vaping in teenagers, she clearly presented the existing evidence as concerning.

Moore-Hepburn said, “To protect yourself… the safest thing to do is to not vape.”

CAROLINE BIEL/THE VARSITY

Beneath your feet: the adaptive world of microbial evolution

How symbiotic bacteria make fitting friends for legumes Caroline Biel Varsity Contributor

Microbes are everywhere. Profuse and diverse, they are tightly connected to our lives. Some of them are unfriendly, such as the virus that curses us with the common cold. Others perform vital functions for us, such as the gut bacteria that help break down proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates in our diets.

Despite the importance of microbes in our world, we know remarkably little about their evolution. Microbes don’t evolve in isolation from other organisms; in fact, they often collaborate and form mutually beneficial relationships — or symbioses — with host creatures.

Many fundamental questions about microbes remain unanswered, including whether the symbioses emerge because hosts ‘choose’ the most beneficial microbes or because the microbes adapt to benefit their hosts. And how do these microbial symbioses evolve on a genetic level?

Rebecca Batstone, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, addressed some of these questions during her time at U of T as a PhD student in the Frederickson lab in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. As part of her research, she looked to legumes and underground symbiotic bacteria for answers. Her findings were recognized in the journal Science last month.

Bean science Legumes — a family of plants that includes alfalfa, clover, beans, peas, and peanuts — are extremely nutritious and protein-rich foods for a reason. Beneath our feet, amongst the tangles of legume roots in the soil, tiny nitrogen-fixing bacteria are doing something plants can’t do on their own: converting atmospheric nitrogen into biologically usable ammonia. These bacteria — known as rhizobia — give legumes a nitrogen boost in exchange for a home and a steady stream of sugar.

In this symbiosis, rhizobia house themselves on legume roots in little compartments called nodules.

If you are ever doing some weeding in your garden or decide to dig up a patch of red clover on a U of T lawn, you’ll be able to see these for yourself. Nodules look like tiny lumps growing on the roots and are visible to the naked eye.

It is not clear what the more important evolutionary force in shaping microbe-host symbioses is. It could be the host ‘choosing’ the most cooperative partners by rewarding them with the most sugar, or microbes evolving to be better partners on their own.

To unravel the mystery, Batstone and her colleagues undertook a greenhouse experiment involving the rhizobium Ensifer meliloti and the Mediterranean legume Medicago truncatula — a popular model organism used in biology.

They added two strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria — an effective, high-performing strain and an ineffective, low-performing strain — to five different plant varieties. Each plant variety differed in how

strongly it chose bacterial partners.

Adaptive microbes, not choosy hosts If a plant’s choosiness is the main evolutionary force shaping microbial cooperation, then we’d expect the choosiest plant variety to most strongly favour the better partner. But the ineffective nitrogen-fixer went nearly extinct across all plants, even on plant varieties that don’t discriminate much between effective and ineffective partners.

Microbes seemed to be the organism shaping the cooperation, not the plants. Independent of host choosiness, the better rhizobial partner still adapted to its local plant variety. Batstone and her colleagues made sure to sequence the rhizobial genomes before and after the evolution experiment to track the kinds of genetic changes that took place. The scientists confirmed that these mutations actually increased the strength of the mutualism in a followup experiment.

“When we put microbes from the beginning and the end of the experiment back onto hosts, we found they did best with the same hosts they evolved on, suggesting they adapted to their local host,” Batstone said in an interview with phys.org.

“The derived microbes were more beneficial when they shared an evolutionary history with their host.”

Therefore, cooperation depended on the match between partners, and cooperation increased as bacteria adapted to their hosts. This result is exciting because it suggests that there might be ways to create microbes that better benefit their hosts.

“It’d be kind of cool, down the road, if we could figure out ways to engineer our microbiomes to select on traits that we want,” said Batstone in an interview with The Varsity. “But from our research, what it’s really suggesting is that there’s probably no universally great microbe, or even microbiome…

It really does depend on the genotype of the individual.”

var.st/science

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

17

The price of our digital ecosystem

U of T’s Ron Deibert delivers 2020’s Massey Lectures Christina Lam Varsity Contributor

Every year, the CBC Massey Lectures invite prominent public voices to deliver a multi-episode lecture series on a particular topic of interest to the general public. Past speakers with an institutional connection to the University of Toronto have included Margaret Atwood and Michael Ignatieff.

This year, the speaker is another local — Ron Deibert, political science professor and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

In his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures series, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, security expert Deibert sounds the alarm on what the internet is doing to our psyches, our civility, and our planet. The title is borrowed from a new book Deibert wrote, which came out earlier this year.

There is a price to be paid for our communications ecosystem, argues Deibert.

The online world has infiltrated the real world.

As Deibert said, we have never been more attached to our phones, “You carry it around with you wherever you go,” he wrote in a conclusion to his lecture series for the CBC. “You sleep with it, work with it, run with it, you play games on it. You depend on it, and panic when you can’t find it.”

In the first lecture, “Look At That Device In Your Hand,” Deibert outlined the issues spawned by social media, including privacy breaches, behavioural manipulation, digital authoritarianism, and the climate crisis. Deibert lamented over what the internet was supposed to accomplish: “Dissolving human conflict into unity… [and] facilitating the emergence of a common ideology based on science.”

Instead, he said that social media is “spreading ignorance and falsehoods, polluting the public sphere, and subjecting us to wholesale surveillance.”

The real consumers In his next lecture, “The Market for Our Minds,” Deibert discussed the commercialization of private data. Every time we use a ‘free’ app on our devices, we are simultaneously handing over

private information — or what Deibert calls “raw materials” — to tech companies. Digitizing human experiences allows companies to collect data on a massive scale. In their world, “we’re the livestock of their farms.” Our data is their profit.

Mass surveillance is not just a breach of privacy — it also has the power to shape our choices.

Businesses rely on surveillance information to predict human behaviours and influence purchase decisions.

Illusion of choices To ensure that the flow of data never stops, social media platforms need to capture and retain users’ attention. In the third lecture, “Toxic Addiction Machines,” Deibert explained why it is so hard to stop scrolling.

Since January, public health officials have not only had to deal with COVID-19 in the real world, but also the infection of the digital world.

Even with the swift pace at which the ‘communication ecosystem’ operates, Deibert wrote in an article with the CBC that “the circulation of information about the coronavirus on social media was flooded with conspiracy theories, misinformation… deliberately propagated false information, known as disinformation, racist memes, chat censorship and surveillance, and even viruses of another kind.”

Users are aware of the ill effects of social media, but most cannot stop looking at their phones. These platforms are designed to exploit human psychology and alter behaviour.

Furthermore, social media does not just manipulate our emotions, it also affects our physical beings. “Social media are addictive because they stimulate us in a powerfully subconscious and hormonal way,” Deibert said.

Using social media mimics the experience of falling in love by releasing oxytocin, or the ‘love hormone.’

Appropriation of the internet The fourth and fifth lectures discuss the farreaching consequences of social media.

In lecture four, “A Great Leap Forward…

For The Abuse Of Power,” Diebert discusses

Ron Deibert’s 2020 Massey Lectures are based on a recent book of his.

COURTESY OF RONALD DEIBERT

the connection that the internet creates between authorities and citizens.

“Social media and our entire communications ecosystem… radically erase the distance between those who exercise authority and the human subjects of their control, both domestically and abroad.

We need not look further than China to see this kind of censorship. Diebert said in the lecture, “China’s cybersecurity law requires private companies to police their users, censor communications on their platforms, and hand over user data to authorities on request.”

An example is how the Chinese government deploy digital surveillance systems to oppress the Uyghur Muslim-minority group in the Xinjiang region of western China. A New York Times investigation published in 2019 revealed that police in the region track data from the city’s inhabitants to reveal when they enter or leave certain neighbourhoods.

Offline damages In his fifth lecture, “Burning Data,” Diebert discussed the digital world’s costliest expense — our planet.

Contrary to the green narratives perpetuated by tech companies, our digital consumption has a very real effect. A typical smart-

phone consists of around 62 different types of metals, according to the lecture, each of which needs to be extracted from the earth, resulting in massive environmental stress. This all happens before the phone even makes it into the consumer’s hand.

Perhaps the most damaging part is the immateriality of it all. “Our consumption of social media… generates a kind of hidden tax on the natural environment that we don’t feel, see, smell, or touch, as we blithely swipe away at a text or tweet,” Deibert said in his lecture.

Moving forward In his sixth and final lecture, “Retreat, Reform, Restraint,” Diebert outlined the steps needed to reclaim the internet for the civic and global good.

He said that we need to have restraints on the internet — policy restraints that curb what companies and governments can do as well as personal restraints for our emotions and internet habits.

“Let’s face it: it won’t be easy, nor will it happen overnight” Diebert wrote in his conclusion for the CBC. “But fatalistic resignation to the status quo is no real alternative either. The principle of restraint can be our guide.”

If your parents told you to exercise after eating, they were right

U of T research suggests post-meal exercise reduces risk of insulin buildup Firdous Kareemuddin Varsity Contributor

In the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted most occupations to online platforms. As a result, many adults are experiencing more uninterrupted sedentary time than before the pandemic, leaving them at a higher risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases, especially after eating a meal.

The risk often results from increased insulin or glucose levels in the bloodstream. After eating, food is digested and then enters the bloodstream. To absorb glucose into cells for respiration, the pancreas produces the enzyme insulin.

This is why the amount of glucose and insulin in the blood rises shortly after eating a meal.

A recent University of Toronto research paper proposes that taking short body-weight exercise breaks during prolonged sitting activities may reduce blood sugar levels after meals.

The danger of glucose buildup Jenna Gillen, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education and lead author of the research paper in question, explained the risks of insulin buildup in an email to The Varsity. She explained that “Increased insulin concentrations in response to meals can be an early sign of risk for metabolic diseases, like type 2 diabetes. It suggests a greater amount of insulin is needed to lower

blood sugar concentration following a meal.”

Taking part in physical activities decreases one’s chance of developing cardiometabolic diseases, such as diabetes. During exercise, the body requires more glucose to maintain cell function and thus needs more insulin to break down this glucose.

Hectic lifestyles can make working out or strolling after lunch difficult. For this reason, Gillen set out to determine whether bodyweight exercises or taking walking breaks after prolonged sitting impact the glycemic and insulin levels in adults after

meals.

Gillen and her team recruited 14 healthy but inactive adults ranging from ages 18–35 and tested their blood sugar levels. An adult was deemed as inactive if they got less than 150 minutes of exercise per week or had a sitting time of over seven hours per day.

Post-meal exercise The team took blood samples at 30-minute intervals for 7.5 hours, specifically after participants had eaten and exercised.

The research spanned three

In the study, doing body-weight exercises after eating reduced insulin buildup.

YERIN LEE/THEVARSITY

days. The first was designated for uninterrupted sitting at 30-minute intervals. The second day consisted of two-minute walks, followed by the third day when participants incorporated a minute of repeated squats at 30-minute intervals. The participants’ diets consisted of approximately 2,027 calories a day, most of which were carbohydrates.

The results showed that the insulin concentration was lower in the squatting groups after having eaten lunch when compared to groups that remained sitting or went on walks. These results show that frequently interrupting sitting with squats is the most effective alternative to walking breaks to reduce post-meal insulin levels in healthy adults.

These results are most significant for adults with Type 2 diabetes, whose bodies do not produce enough insulin. Gillen also wrote that diabetic adults can achieve similar results by exercising at other times of the day instead of just after a meal. “There is evidence to suggest that a similar frequency of activity breaks throughout the day… can lower the spikes in blood sugar following meals in those with obesity and type two diabetes,” she wrote.

All in all, it is essential to maintain one’s health in these difficult and unusual times.

Whether it be in the simple forms of doing squats or walking around your workspace, some form of movement during the day is essential for physical and mental wellness.

Sports

November 23, 2020 var.st/sports sports@thevarsity.ca

Karim Mané: the great baller of the north

An NBA debut from a Canadian college — and what it means for the country’s teams Avishai Sol Varsity Staff

One man who is joining the NBA’s Orlando Magic can carry so much significance in the world of hoops, especially Canadian hoops. I’m talking about Canadian 20-year-old point guard of Senegalese descent, from Québec’s Vanier College, Karim Mané.

You’re probably thinking right now, “Okay, so he’s a draft prospect who’s got some skills. Why is that so significant?”

I’ll tell you why.

The great white north in the NBA Mané is the first player in the NBA from Québec’s CEGEP who didn’t have to play in the United States first to do so.

Basketball in Canada has been growing leaps and bounds in recent years, but the NBA’s ‘true north’ stars have often taken the more conventional path to the league through Division I American schools.

The Canadian College Athletics Association (CCAA) is a strange middle ground for developing professional talent. If you’re a star Canadian basketball prospect, then chances are you will get recruited to an American school and play against stronger competition under the greater professional focus of the US’ National Collegiate Athletic Association.

That puts a hard cap on the kinds of players who want to stay and play for Canadian colleges. Just last year, Ryerson University’s Tanor Ngom was re-

cruited to Florida State University. You can’t blame these guys for wanting to play in America. It’s better for their game and their draft stock.

This means that talented basketball players on the Varsity Blues, for example, are less likely to get noticed by NBA drafters than American players.

The story of Mané As a prospect, Mané’s most consistent selling point is his athleticism. In light of COVID-19 travel restrictions, NBA scouts don’t have a ton of film or have firsthand minutes watched of Mané, but the physical tools at least, are undeniable.

Standing 6’5 with a 6’10 wingspan, Mané tends to the defensive end of the floor with grace and agility, but flips the switch with the ball in his hands and launches himself down the court with ferocity. If you took a friend who’s never watched basketball in their life to a Vanier game and asked them to pick out who they thought the best player was, they would pick Mané — the man just looks like an NBA player.

The physical tools are great, but athleticism isn’t enough to make it in the league. I was curious to learn about what Mané is like mentally: his work ethic, his drive, his personality. In an interview with Vanier College basketball’s head coach, Feras Saaida, I asked about his star player. “It may sound a little cliché, but the one word I would use to describe him off the court is elite… He just presents himself in a different way and takes care of business,” Saaida said.

Saaida told me that Mané had a four-hour

Testing UTrain: Barre Do the workouts really work?

Karim Mané’s presence in the NBA is promising for Canadian players.

COURTESY OF TJ DRAGOTTA/UNSPLASH

round trip to come to school every day, “but he was still one of the best guys academically on [the] team… He’s super focused; it’s very rare that you’ll see him lose focus.”

When asked about Mané’s presence on the team, Saaida described a player who comes to win: “Sometimes in the film sessions it would be a conversation between me and him, just because he’s answering every single question… He’s somebody that, in my opinion, whatever he does in life, he will do well because of the person and the man he is.”

At the highest level of basketball, everyone is a

Rowing reflections: reviewing our pandemic routine

In conversation with U of T team president on training during the pandemic Laura Ashwood Sports Editor

Alexandra Waddel Varsity Contributor

This workout was hard, yet achievable, and the best one yet.

There is something about the week after reading week that is specifically stressful. It seemed like I just couldn’t fit in a scheduled workout, but luckily, UTrain has three playlists of on-demand content to choose from.

These playlists are available on YouTube and have a wide range of the class types that were recorded during our lockdown summer and fall semester. I was excited to have more options for class types since the classes didn’t need to work around my class schedule.

“Meet us at the Barre” I personally love pilates, so I was intrigued by the barre class. The class description on YouTube describes the class as a fusion of ballet, pilates, and yoga, which felt exactly like what I wanted. I was ready to “stand tall and proud” and focus on something other than school.

This was the best class I’ve done so far as a part of testing UTrain. It was hard, yet achievable. The music was great, and the instruction was great. Rachel, a dance teacher, introduced herself and said it was going to be a 45-minute class with a stretch at the beginning and end.

She gave us a couple of minutes to get prepared, which was nice, since this was the first class I’ve done that required equipment. We would need a resistance band, sliders, and a yoga mat. Luckily, I had a resistance band and just used socks as a replacement for the sliders. Rachel also listed alternatives for all the

great athlete, but it’s the smart and spirited ones who thrive.

That’s why Mané has the potential to be a pivotal player for Canadian college hoops. If he can come into the NBA and hold his own it’ll prove to American scouts that the CCAA has players worth respecting. It raises the credibility of the entire league, which includes our Varsity Blues.

I truly believe that Mané can have a strong career in the NBA. And if he does, this only means one thing for Canadian university players going forward: the sky’s the limit.

MAKIHA JAIN/THEVARSITY

equipment in order to make the class more accessible.

The workout consisted of a balance-focused warm up, followed by legs using the sliders. It was a lot of curtsy lunges and pulsing — all of which I felt the next day. We did a plie squat series, which always gets me shaking, and paired this with a dancer arms series.

Between the targeted sections, we did some intermediate cardio moves to get the heart racing and to work up a bit of a sweat. I was surprised at how much I sweat during this class: I had already showered in the morning and wasn’t really expecting to have to shower again. We then used the resistance band for an arm and butt series.

We finished with some ab work and planking before moving onto our cool down and stretch. I loved this workout!

YouTube workouts Especially given that the class was on YouTube, I was expecting some boring copyright-free music, but I was positively surprised. The whole class was choreographed to music, which is great for motivation, and the music ranged from recognizable hits from the likes of Ariana Grande and Beyoncé to funky beats by a Brazilian band that Rachel had discovered while travelling.

As much as I was resisting doing this workout, I am so glad I did and would recommend it to everyone! The best part is that it’s part of UTrain’s ondemand programming, so you can do barre whenever and wherever!

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March brought lockdowns and regulations, the Varsity Blues rowing team has faced all the trials and tribulations that the rest of the Blues community has faced. As a team member, I watched as we focused on keeping morale high while regulations prevented us from training together over the course of the summer and into the fall.

I sat down on behalf of The Varsity with rowing team president and third-year Rotman commerce student — and my friend — Katie Gay to talk about how she made sure that the 2020–2021 season could still be fruitful and fun.

When the school year came to an end, athletes were held in suspense as to what their training would look like for the upcoming year. As measures started to lax in the summer, Toronto’s two rowing clubs, Argonauts and Hanlan, were quick to help U of T athletes get back into boats: “The athletes were able to go down pretty much six days a week to the boathouse,” Gay said.

Crew boats were not allowed except for those rowers who lived together or were in designated ‘bubbles,’ so we spent a summer in single rowing shells. Every morning, we would wave and chat to each other from our own boats as we rowed by, trying to emulate the sense of community that would be so effortless if we were all rowing together in the same boat.

As on-water training continued into the school

year, training opportunities at the university for secondary workouts grew as well. “Our coach worked really hard to make sure we had access to [rowing machines],” said Gay. “The team also got to attend their strength sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, ensuring that the athletes got “their two-a-days in.”

Gay admitted that morale has been a consistent issue since COVID-19 started. “My morale has been an issue,” Gay confessed.

Our teammates, however, kept her going. “I’ve been very impressed with how the U of T team has been able to keep the morale up,” Gay said. “I credit that to a lot of the younger, incoming athletes, which shows good promise for the upcoming years.”

Gay emphasized that the goal for this year was not banners or medals but “to get to next season.”

The team is focused on creating goals throughout this training season to keep motivation up: they are performing a RADAR week, for example, which is a week that consists of three gruelling tests on the rowing machine to determine fitness.

“As much as some of the athletes are not RADAR’s biggest fans, it has been keeping our training up because it gives us something to work for.”

All in all, the team is focused on sticking together and keeping goals in their sight as they work through every hurdle. As Toronto enters a lockdown in the winter, the team is facing another demoralizing stretch of time without team strength sessions or onwater practices. But if 5:00 am practices and twice-aday workouts have taught us anything, it’s that we can get through any challenge with a little determination.

During the pandemic, the team has been working hard to keep morale up and emulate the usual sense of community.

COURTESY OF VARSITY BLUES

var.st/sports

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

How to get enough sleep in Zoom university Constant screens and time in bed can ruin your chances

Angad Deol Associate Sports Editor

ISABELLA TAN/THEVARSITY

Avishai Sol Varsity Staff

Limit your blue light intake — especially in the evening Your phone, computer monitor, and TV emit large amounts of blue light, which can impair your circadian rhythm — the internal process that regulates your sleep schedule — at night, reducing the production of important sleep hormones, such as melatonin. To prevent this, you can purchase glasses that essentially block blue light, or use apps on your phone that limit blue light. Reducing exposure to bright lights around two hours before bed can also be beneficial.

No more late-night snacks — or meals Those late-evening strolls down to the fridge and cupboard to indulge on your favourite snacks may impact your sleep. A large meal before bed can impair sleep quality by interfering with melatonin release, so maybe stay in bed instead of reaching for that box of cereal.

Cut down the caffeine!

As hard as it may sound, cutting down caffeine intake four to six hours before bedtime can improve sleep. It is common knowledge that caffeine is a great way to keep you awake, so, of course, not having any in the period before bed is a good idea. Try limiting your caffeine intake to before noon.

Create a good sleep routine If you’re like me, you often check the clock throughout the night to see what time it is. This unfortunate habit can lead to increased stress and actually hurts your ability to fall asleep. Furthermore, reading a book, doing a relaxation exercise, and using comfortable, good quality bedding can all promote a healthy, good night’s sleep.

ANDREA ZHAO/THEVARSITY

Get out of bed!

Try separating your comfort spaces from your workspaces to prevent yourself from getting sleepy during the workday or being wide awake at night. The Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School advises people to “keep computers, TVs, and work materials out of the room [to] strengthen the mental association between your bedroom and sleep.” This means that a conflation of work and relaxation spaces may mean that both pursuits suffer.

All in all, during these stressful times, sleep is important to stay happy, healthy, and focused on school. Good luck and happy sleeping!

The mental benefits of physical health How physical activity combats stress and anxiety

There’s no doubt that 2020 has been a stressful year, especially for students. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reported that since the pandemic, the stress and anxiety levels of Canadians has drastically increased.

While there are so many ways to reduce stress, paying a little extra attention to your physical health is one of the best ways to ease your mind while battling those last few assignments and preparing for exams.

The brain benefits of moving Health Canada recommends that individuals over 18 years of age perform 150 minutes, or about 2.5 hours of physical activity every week. Regularly exercising plays a large role in achieving a healthy mind, as incorporating physical activity into your daily or weekly lifestyle has several positive effects on your mental health.

First and foremost, physical activity has several psychological benefits, as it reduces your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that might be particularly elevated at the moment. When you exercise, your body releases its happy hormones, like endorphins and serotonin. Endorphins are chemicals that work to relieve stress and healp your body chill out, and serotonin works in a similar way, as it increases your happiness and helps to regulate your sleep schedule.

Another reason why physical activity is so important is because it helps to subside feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression, which further decreases your cortisol levels. More specifically, working out or engaging in challenging activities like yoga forces your mind to concentrate on the exercise you are performing.

Student-friendly ways to get active

How to get the hang of a hangover

Best ways to recover based on your drink of choice

We’re essentially glued to our screens from morning until night — whether we’re cramming for a midterm, finishing up an assignment that’s due at 11:59 pm, or constantly refreshing the Walmart website to see if the PlayStation 5 is in stock. Especially when we can attend classes from the comfort of our beds, getting the right amount of sleep may be challenging.

Getting a good, restful sleep at night can foster a healthy lifestyle that promotes exercise and healthy food consumption. On the flip side, not getting adequate sleep can lead to side effects such as a decline in brain function, weight gain, and negative hormonal changes. Too much sleep can be harmful too: it can increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, for example.

Here are some great ways to ensure you get the best sleep possible.

Alessia Baptista Varsity Contributor

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New activities that you engage in serve as a healthy distraction from other stressful priorities, like school, work, and other social factors. While more challenging exercises are a good option, simple movements like walking or running while listening to your favourite playlist do just as well. The goal is to revert your attention to light activities that reduce stress and improve your physical health, so any activity will result in a positive change.

The longer you maintain an exercise regime, the more likely you are to see positive results in your mental and physical well-being. As students, it is important that if we are going to make this change to live a healthier lifestyle, we need to make this a maintainable process. But what does ‘maintainable’ look like?

Make sure that your goals are specific to your current work schedule; if you can only devote 10 minutes

a day to exercise, then consider this a simple 10-minute change that will positively benefit your mental and physical well-being.

As a reminder — any kind of activity counts!

Going for a walk, doing a workout you found on YouTube, or even some yoga are all great ways to ease your mind. Find your favourite activities or exercises and stick to them.

In order for you to maintain your health and fitness goals, it is important to do what works best for you. These habits will also make maintaining your health an enjoyable process because you are in control of the activities you enjoy doing, and it won’t feel forced or dreadful. Hopefully, the consistent release of these happy hormones and decreased stress levels encourages you to implement your own physical activity routine!

FIONA TUNG/THEVARSITY

Although your nights at outdoor patios are over in light of Toronto’s newest lockdown measures, parties with your roommates in the exclusivity and privacy of your own home are still on. Hangovers are just as bad from a night in as a night out, and the day after is always a doozy.

Want to know how to feel your best the next day? Here are some workouts or recovery methods to help you feel your best the next morning, based on how you chose to indulge the night before.

Too many beers?

Beer is low in alcohol content but can be high in carbohydrates and calories. For the day after a lot of beers, I would recommend a more intense, cardio-centric workout. Most often, the stuff in alcohol that is the culprit for a rough morning after are congeners, which are the byproducts of fermentation besides ethanol.

These complex organic molecules are responsible for tannins, for example, but also for your hangover.

Because beer fermentation does not produce a lot of congeners, you should take advantage of your more mild hangover the next day by pushing yourself !

Too many mixed drinks?

Some mixed drinks don’t have as many carbohydrates as non-light varieties of beer, but they have even more sugar. This means that a splitting headache is coming your way. Sugar does not spike blood alcohol level, but just in the same way that eating a whole cake would upset your stomach, drinking equally sugary drinks may do the same.

If your stomach is feeling queasy after a night of margaritas, maybe consider being gentle with yourself the next day. Low intensity yoga could prevent too much nauseating jostling and help you to get back in tune with your body after sending it through the ringer.

Too many shots?

Shots, being hard alcohol, are low in sugars and starches but high in alcohol percentage, so you’re likely to experience a stronger hangover after a night of too many shots. Poorly distilled alcohols are especially good at giving you a hangover because they have a higher amount of congeners.

If you want to get back on your feet and feel strong again, I would recommend a longer, lower intensity workout. More reps, less weight, or more time on the treadmill at lower speeds will help you get back into your workout routine without too much strain.

A common myth about hangovers is that they can be sweat out: in fact, if you really over-indulged, sweating it out could make the hangover worse. Getting back on the health horse is admirable after a wild night out, but at the end of the day, don’t push yourself if you’re hungover. Chances are your symptoms will pass in a few hours, and you’ll be able to finish your regular workout with less of a struggle.

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THE VARSITY

DIVERSIONS

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

Comic: “Maybe this class won’t be too bad” By: Ananya Ananth

Have a U of T-focused comic for The Varsity? Email illustration@thevarsity.ca with your submissions!