Keyword: alumni profile
Alumni in Their Own Words - Nicole Richard Williams
Nicole Richard graduated from CMU in 2013 with a Bachelor of Music Therapy.
Where has your life taken you since you left CMU?
After finishing my Bachelor of Music Therapy at CMU, I worked as a music therapist in Winnipeg for about three years. During this time, I started working with many clients on the autism spectrum and noticed that doing rhythmic and drumming interventions with these folks really seemed to help them reach some of their therapeutic goals. I wanted to deepen my understanding of how exactly music therapy could help autistic children. Going to grad school had always been a dream of mine, and so I decided to take some time off working to do a Master's in Music and Health Science at the University of Toronto. During that degree, I decided I wanted to continue on and do a PhD and was accepted again at the Music and Health Science Research Collaboratory (the lab out of which the master's and PhD are based) at the University of Toronto.
Alumna explores intersection between land, people, and faith at Yale
Anika Reynar (CMU '17, Interdisciplinary Studies – Social Ecology) lives her life with one foot in the library and one foot in the garden—and also the classroom, the church, and around the table. She's pursuing her passions by doing not just one, but two, master's degrees simultaneously at Yale University.
Unraveling the modern Mennonite story, one panel at a time
You may think that most books about Mennonites wouldn't dare to begin with young adults drinking, smoking, and driving a car in donuts around a church parking lot, but author Jonathan Dyck isn't so sure.
Dyck (CMU '09) is the author of the award-winning graphic novel Shelterbelts, which explores themes of Queer identity, inclusive churches, the history of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and much more, all set in the fictional, sleepy Mennonite community of Hespeler.
CMU alumna brings climate action into the provincial election
In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report stating that a global average temperature increase of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels would significantly increase the severity and occurrence of extreme weather events, forever altering Earth's ecosystems.
Perseverance, pilgrimage, and the Bitter Sweet Trail
On October 24, 2020, Kenji Dyck (BA '19, Communications and Media) premiered his documentary Bitter Sweet Trail: Japanese Canadians and the Alberta Sugar Beets, which followed a 2019 bus tour through southern Alberta. Produced by David Iwaasa, and in partnership with Nikkei National Museum, the film tells the story of many Japanese sugar beet farmers who experienced internment, dispossession, and detainment through the Second World War. Tour participants, made up of Japanese Canadians who farmed sugar beets in the mid-20th century, visited sites that played a significant role in Japanese Canadian history. For most Japanese Canadians, this was a time of racial persecution as well as a time of persistence. "The tour and the film," Dyck explains, "is to remember not only the injustice but also the perseverance of the Japanese Canadian people."
CMU Alumni Profile: Lauren Harms, BA General Social Sciences
Lauren Harms (BA '15, General Social Sciences) wears two hats, that of a pastor and of an art therapist, which are taken on and off in the same room in the same Calgary apartment every day over Zoom. Founder of "Lily Inspired", an art therapy practice that focuses on individual and group art therapy as well as expressive arts workshops, Harms combines the creative process and psychotherapy, enabling her clients to explore their healing through colour, shape, and form.
In God’s Country: Alumna finds joy and purpose teaching in Canada’s far north
Gjoa Haven is situated on William Island, Nunavut, a little over 2,000 kilometres north of Winnipeg. As the crow flies, it's about as far from here to Vancouver. But the Mercator effect is truer to life in Canada than ninth-grade social studies would have us believe: in significance if not in substance, distances expand toward the Pole. While the realities of life up north can be harsh, for Katrina Brooks, a 2015 alumna of CMU's Bachelor of Arts in English now teaching at Gjoa Haven's Qiqirtaq Ilihakvik High School, this expansion of space and consciousness is a taste of what it feels like to be in God's country.
Music Therapy graduate making a difference
Jesse Dollimont has always known about music's therapeutic effect, but it became especially real to her while working as an intern at the Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary, AB.
Dollimont, who graduated from CMU with a Bachelor of Music Therapy in 2016, recalls times during her internship when she would go to the hospital's intensive care unit and play music for a child in distress.
Print This Article