Hi!

My name is Soumya George. Here's a little history about me, I was raised in Dubai, and lived there for most of my childhood. Moving to Canada and starting high school here was a big experience for me, primarily due to the different cultural way of living and working. The biggest change was the weather differences, having come from a climate that remained basically summer all year around to a changing forecast on a daily basis still amazes me. I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, and a doing my double major in International Development Studies as well as in Human Geography.

Moving around when I was young has helped spark my interest in traveling and understanding how different places across the globe have diffeerent experiances, lifestyles and opinions. I look forward to working hopefully with youth someday, enabling them to move forward and exposing them to the amount of opportunities that surround them to become successful people. Education is the greatest equalizer in allowing people to become aware and successful throughout their lives, and providing children with that opportunity is what I hope someday to successfully do. I really really love working with kids!

I chose to take this course in order to expand my understanding of International Development Studies, as well as knowing that it would help with my studies in this particular major. Im very nervous but excited in being a part of this, as it widens and streatches what I was typically taught throughout schooling, but now shows me a different perspective on changes around me. Being taught a typical method all through childhood, and then being shown a different way of going out accomplishing the very same task is honestly unnerving but I look forward to this course! The different ways we use technology in the classroom and the methods of sharing knowledge and information in this current time is amazing.

An active learner, in my understanding is someone who is able to grasp a new concept and put it into practise in their daily lives. I am hoping to broaden my understanding and deepen my knowledge of how issues around the globe surface, the different opinions and objectives that take place after it, and the ways and methods from different perspectives on dealing with it. I honestly am able to grasp a new idea better when it gets discussed and dissected within a group, versus listening to someone drone on about it. I have the strength of communication and the ability to look at a topic from a variety of angles and perspectives. I enjoy listening to other people bring fresh ideas and their views to a subject, and it helps me gain a better understanding of it as well. I am also honestly speaking technologically challenged, and this class helps me learn a lot more on how to make it part of my daily schedule and how convenient a tool it becomes. Sharing information and knowledge has changed drastically from newpapers and books to online readings and documents that allow different people around the globe to work on the same page! (hint: wikipedia)

The reason IDS is such an interesting course, is that it provokes and challenges the human mind from what we were initially trained to recieve and allocate without being critical or objective about it. By learning to change that mindset, we now for example look at a newspaper article and are able to see the missing links, the biases, the one sided opinions and say hmm, there is more to this story than just that little information provided, or I dont agree with that statement, because I see the other side to the argument. I hope that the learning we receive in the classroom would help increase my knowledge of current world events happening around me, and the different impacts they cause.

Thankyou!