An experiential learning opportunity gave St. Mike’s student Sarah Frank the tools to explore her passions more deeply to learn about the world around her. She will be celebrating this milestone on Monday, October 27 when she graduates at the University of Toronto’s Convocation ceremony.
“Coming to U of T and being at St. Mike’s gave me the best four years and I’m sad to be officially concluding that chapter in my life, but I’m also excited to celebrate how awesome those four years were,” she says.
After missing out on an in-person high school graduation in 2020, Sarah Frank fully embraced her new surroundings when she moved into Sorbara Hall in her first year.
“I always felt like St. Mike’s was a place of warmth and community. The St. Mike’s community is so diverse that I felt like I was learning new things from everyone I met and having the presence of the Catholic tradition on the campus gave me a sense of calm,” she says. “The whole campus has this calming effect. The St. Mike’s quad is so beautiful and having St. Basil’s there is like a comfort built into the St. Mike’s campus.”
In residence, she enjoyed having someone to talk to and connected with her Don, with whom she shared a lot of interests, valuing her insights on course selection.
In her first year, she enrolled in St. Mike’s Gilson Seminar, which became foundational to her undergraduate experience. The Seminar is a two-part course that explores how the Christian faith intersects with some of today’s most important questions. It also includes a trip to Rome.
“It was a true hands-on learning experience—we were learning about traditions in the exact places they took root,” she says. “Studying in Rome was magical and, when I returned, I appreciated St. Mike’s even more,” she continues.
Through this experience, she formed a close-knit community and it piqued her curiosity on different fields of study, which she explored through her Book & Media Studies major and minors in history and human geography.
Students from the Gilson Seminar continued to stay in touch through Dodgeball and Meatballs evenings, where past Gilson Seminar students of all years could come together for a fun evening of intramural sports and a pasta dinner. She also attended a book club on Dante, organized by the Gilson Seminar’s teaching assistant.
In her first year, she also had the privilege of taking Introduction to Book & Media Studies with Prof. Paolo Granata. “It provided a good preview of what the program continued to be throughout the rest of my degree,” she says, adding that she appreciated how Book & Media Studies touched upon so many of her interests.
“It felt like a program curated just for me because it combined a lot of my passions, including media, marketing, journalism, and art in an interesting way,” she says.
“By studying a range of topics, I received a well-rounded education that gave me a better grasp of the world around me and the issues we currently face. I feel this understanding has benefited me in my everyday life and will certainly help me as I enter the teaching profession,” she says.
Sarah is currently pursuing a teaching degree from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is open to pursuing any number of paths the profession may take her.
“I feel like everything I have learned has been so applicable to life in general and I will definitely be using this knowledge,” she says.
No matter her life’s journey, she will take with her the lessons she learned at St. Mike’s — both inside and outside of the classroom.