A Year in Review - Evolve Rebooted: The Zoom Series
Let’s look back at our first event of the year, Evolve Rebooted: The Zoom Series!
This year’s Evolve was special in many ways, after all, it was the first virtual event for CMNSU! Evolve has been our keystone welcome event for the last three years and we felt it was important to keep this going, and connect with our CMNS community now, more than ever. In keeping with the theme, we “evolved” and rebooted the entire event into a 3-day Zoom summit with different topics of dialogue for every day.
We really had no idea what to expect as this was completely new to CMNSU and students. It was definitely a learning curve as many challenges arose with adapting to our new online environment. And of course, there are times when technology just doesn't work quite how we want! We learned a lot about rolling with the punches, letting go of things we couldn’t control, and making the most of what we could do.
On the first day, “Evolve Your Freshman Year”, we got a chance to talk about productivity, motivation, and time management with CMNS professor, Steven Malcic, whose advice was to “stress less about school, just do the best you can in each class”. We also got to hear some valuable insights from CMNS Co-op Coordinator, Sara Sethna.
The second day was to “Evolve Your Social Awareness”. As Communication students, we are lucky to be able to apply our knowledge to facilitate a greater change. Like CMNS professor Martin Laba said, “communication and media education is social transformative”. CMNSU alumni, Angela and Eman, concluded the day by saying that “social change starts with your own social circles”, and we couldn’t agree more! If you would like to further explore the topic of social activism and evolve your social awareness, check out these courses:
CMNS 240 - The Political Economy of Communication
CMNS 327 - Media, Learning, and Social Change
CMNS 425 - Applied Communication for Social Issues.
On the last day, “Evolve Your Mental Wellbeing”, we wrapped it up with a meaningful conversation about mental health with Martin Mroz from SFU’s Health & Counselling. The key takeaway from Martin’s speech was to “exercise self-compassion” and ask for help when needed.
With all things considered, Evolve was a huge success! We had a strong turnout and impactful speakers who sparked important dialogue among our participants. We’re so thankful to everyone who came to Evolve. We appreciate you for joining us in trying out this new way of connecting and participating in the candid conversations. We were able to connect with our community and contribute to 3 local organizations as all our proceeds were equally allocated between Black Women in Motion, Native Women’s Association of Canada, and Yemen Children’s Relief Fund.
Thank all the attendees and guest speakers who made Evolve such a success, we couldn’t have done it without you! It was truly an amazing experience that we will cherish for a long time! And special thanks to all of our sponsors who made the prizes possible! We would like to thank everyone for supporting Evolve Rebooted: The Zoom Series.
Here’s a look through some of our amazing prizes from our generous sponsors!
