What surprised you most about your time at Laurier?

When Shazlin Rahman, BA ’12, began studying journalism at Laurier’s Brantford campus, she expected that she would learn how to become a journalist. But she was surprised at how the program also ignited a passion that has been at the centre of all her work ever since: to tell or facilitate the telling of stories that more meaningfully reflect the cultural fabric of Canada.

Due to the nature of the program, she started to consume news more frequently than she had before, and it soon became apparent to her there was a serious gap in the representation of people of colour in mainstream media. As a Muslim woman of colour, Rahman noticed that many mainstream journalists were predominantly white, and that played a role in their coverage. She turned to the internet to find a broader range of perspectives and stories. It was there she discovered a group of Muslim women who call themselves hijabi bloggers and were talking about issues that most North American journalists were ignoring. They were vlogging about their lives and the goings on in their communities.

That was when Shazlin decided to use her voice, and the skills she was learning as a journalism student, to tell stories through a more diverse lens. She became the opinion editor for The Sputnik, the Brantford campus’s independent student newspaper, where she had the opportunity to help people publish stories on issues that normally would not have been reported.

Since graduating from Laurier, Rahman completed an M.A. in Communication and Culture from Ryerson and York University and now works as a communications and stakeholder engagement specialist at the Inspirit Foundation in Toronto. The foundation promotes and works towards a more inclusive and pluralistic Canada by addressing discrimination due to ethnicity, race and religion. In her free time, Rahman is a busy freelance writer, with credits in the Toronto Star, Spacing, New Canadian Media and The Ethnic Aisle, and hosts neighbourhood walks around Toronto. On these walks, the group stops at different locations around the city where crimes involving Islamophobia occurred. Rahman tells the story of the events that took place and teaches people how they, as community members, can help turn those locations into sites of solidarity through simple every day actions.

It’s all part of the same passion to help tell stories that reflect Canada’s cultural diversity. “It's something that has crystallized for me over the past year or so, but I realize this common thread across all my work took root while I was finishing j-school,” she says.

Meghan Gauvin is a fourth-year Digital Media and Journalism student and the opinion editor of The Sputnik, the Brantford campus’s independent student newspaper. After graduation, she will start a five-month contract with the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario.

The Ask Our Alumni project was created as a way introduce students to one of Laurier’s most valuable resources—our more than 100,000 alumni. Across all campuses, students submitted questions on a range of topics, from how to make the most of their time at Laurier to what happens after they graduate. Alumni were matched with questions that spoke to their expertise and interviewed by Digital Media and Journalism students from the Brantford campus, who then wrote the resulting stories. Overseen by Bruce Gillespie, an associate professor in the Digital Media and Journalism program, this project is funded by the Special Initiatives Fund.