5Q Summer Edition: SHARE intern Emelyana Titarenko (’19)
1. What is your summer internship and what will you take away from this experience?
This summer I am working as a SHARE (Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education Service) Peer Education Assistant. My position is mainly responsible for finding new ways to educate and raise awareness about sexual assault, sexual harassment, and relationship violence. This also includes planning for how we can better educate the incoming students about our Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Policy and promote our SHARE service along with providing training for the Orientation team, Residence Executives, Residence Assistants and Academic Mentors. One of the main projects that I have been working on is the bystander training because I believe that it is the first step towards a safer campus. I am definitely going to take away a lot of new experience and skills from this internship. Working alongside Melody (Petlock, Mount Allison’s SHARE Advisor) is great because she has been doing this job for a long time so she has so much knowledge about so many things that it not only educates me but it constantly pushes me to educate myself further on sexual assault and related issues.
2. What is the best thing about summer in Sackville?
The best thing about Sackville summer is definitely all the amazing students that stayed. Everyone is so inclusive and fun, you are almost never bored! I met and made friends with a lot of great people this summer so it made the summer very exciting and definitely really memorable. Oh and our beautiful campus of course, all the trees and flowers make even the rainy days feel not so bad.
3. What are you involved in on campus?
Aside from being involved with SHARE, I am also the Vice President Communications for the MASU, the athletic trainer for the Varsity Volleyball team and a full time SMILE volunteer.
4. What are you looking forward to most about next year at Mount A?
I am definitely really excited about being a part of the MASU and all the great things we have planned for the year. However, I am mostly really excited to spend time with my friends and create as many great memories as we can because most of them are graduating next year so it is definitely going to be a bittersweet year.
5. What are your post-MtA plans?
As of right now, my post Mt Allison plans include a year of some traveling and working and then hopefully grad school. Thankfully I still have two more years to make more concrete plans!
Bonus Question: If you could give one piece of advice to first-year students, what would it be?
One of best advice that I was given in my first year was to “rip up the cool kid card” and I think that would be the same advice I would give to first year students. Rip up that cool kid card and go outside of your comfort zone, try things that you think might sound lame and make friends with people from different friend groups and just have FUN! Your university experience is only as great as you make it so there is no time to miss out on things because it doesn’t seem “cool.”