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Zarina Giannone lives by the principle of creating, grasping, and making the most of every opportunity she can. When I spoke with her, we attributed this quote to Winston Churchill \u2013 almost everyone does. On further investigation, however, there is no evidence that Churchill ever said this. The earliest known utterance of a similar sentiment was by the Mayor of Carlisle, Bertram Carr, in 1919, as he addressed the Fifty-First Annual Cooperative Congress in the middle of a global pandemic.<\/p>\n
The provenance of the quote is, of course, immaterial. It is quite likely that this was a saying that circulated England for many years before being transcribed from Bertram\u2019s speech. I just happen to be the person who has the time to look up such things as the provenance of quotes. Zarina Giannone is not that person \u2013 she is too busy seizing real opportunities.<\/p>\n
One of those opportunities was her election to the CPA Board of Directors as the Student Representative. Zarina had been a student rep, and from there took on role after role until finally making this step in the first year of her Master\u2019s. She says of her three year term on the CPA Board,<\/p>\n
\u201cSeriously, it goes down in the books as the most important part of my training to date. Even counting my seven years of graduate school, the experience [of sitting on the Board] was the most valuable to me. Because of the people I met and learned from, but also just to see the system, how it works across the country. After my term ended on the board, I was elected to the BC Psychological Association Board, where I\u2019ve just now come to the end of my three-year term. I\u2019m now a senior student, and with the experience I had with the CPA Board, I have a lot more to contribute.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are many important parts of Zarina\u2019s training, not all of them academic. For many years, she was an elite-level soccer player, going to UBC on an athletic scholarship and playing for the Thunderbirds for the duration of that scholarship. In fact, she focused so much on soccer at that time that she neglected her studies a little bit \u2013 it was her boyfriend at the time (now fianc\u00e9 \u2013 more on that later) who encouraged her to dive more heavily into her studies, and her love for the field of psychology took off from there.<\/p>\n
Zarina\u2019s experiences as a high-performance athlete come in to play all the time for her now, as she works with sports teams as a mental performance consultant. In her job at the Vancouver Psychology Centre, she provides two different services, broadly speaking. One is performance related \u2013 how do you achieve peak performance, how do you get around barriers like choking or performance anxiety. The other is on the clinical side, where she deals with clinical psychological issues in sports. These might be anxiety-related, depressive symptoms, trauma-related challenges, disordered eating, and that kind of thing.<\/p>\n
All these things \u2013 soccer, scholarships, the CPA Student Rep Program, the Student Section, the Boards, the job at Vancouver Psychology Centre, are opportunities Zarina has seized when they presented themselves. But she is also, by nature, a creator<\/em> of opportunity as well. In 2015, she was learning about the systems-level approach to education and psychology from her position on the CPA Board of Directors, and also representing students on the section level as the Chair of the Student Executive.<\/p>\n What is the psychological concept (bystander apathy, confirmation bias, that sort of thing) that blew you away when you first heard it?<\/strong> Do you have a sport that you like to watch or play, and what is it?<\/strong> You can listen to only one musical artist\/group for the rest of your life. Who is it?<\/strong> If you could spend a day in someone else\u2019s shoes who would it be and why<\/strong> If you could become an expert at something outside psychology, what would it be?<\/strong> She noted issues and challenges that she had experienced as a student \u2013 having to be really resourceful throughout the various steps of her training, and not having enough information available and accessible to her. Out of this need, the Student Mentorship Program was born. Zarina realized that connecting students with one another across the country could alleviate some of these stresses for students just starting out, by pairing them with older students who had gone through the same process and could direct them in constructive ways.<\/p>\n Mentors are graduate-level students, while mentees are undergrads or early graduate level students. Most psychology students, by virtue of the fact that they are taking similar courses in similar subjects and following similar career paths, have a lot in common. They share a career passion and a course load, for example. But Zarina thought there could be more to the mentor-mentee relationship than simply subject matter.<\/p>\n When students signed up to be on either side of this partnership, they would fill out forms. What area are you hoping to go into? What are some of your interests? What would you like to get out of the mentoring relationship? Once those questions had been answered, Zarina and her colleagues from the Student Section Executive would match mentors and mentees based on shared goals, interests, and other commonalities. Kind of like a matchmaking service, in a non-romantic sense. And one that proved to be a little bit COVID-proof, since students were connecting virtually with mentors from universities all across Canada for the program.<\/p>\n Not all things, however, are COVID-proof, and not all things are non-romantic. Though Zarina says she hasn\u2019t had too many problems with school, or work, since the pandemic began, one big thing remains undone. Remember that boyfriend, now fianc\u00e9, who encouraged her to get more into psychology? She was scheduled to marry him in Mexico, in November.<\/p>\n Even the most prepared among us, those accustomed to turning every difficulty into an opportunity, are sometimes confronted by a disappointment beyond our control. It is in this case that Zarina sees that one opportunity that exists in all circumstances \u2013 the opportunity to learn something.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to postpone it, and hopefully have it in November of next year. Or\u2026whenever it\u2019s possible. We\u2019ll figure it out, we\u2019ll work through it, we\u2019ll learn. I think it\u2019s such a privilege that our whole lives we can be learning. I\u2019m always reminded of the things I don\u2019t know. On his death bed Michelangelo was in the middle of painting a fresco, and he told someone near him \u2018ancora imparo\u2019. \u2018I\u2019m still learning\u2019. That\u2019s kind of my attitude too.\u201d<\/p>\n Zarina is far from the end of her days, as she is just starting her career in psychology, has just finished her PhD, and is about to start life as a married person. That leaves a lot of life, and a lot of learning, to do. And Zarina is on her way to experiencing it all.<\/p>\n Postscript: Michelangelo really did say \u2018ancora imparo\u2019 on his death bed, that quote checks out.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zarina Giannone has seized every opportunity presented to her \u2013 CPA Student Rep, Chair of the Student Section, Student Member on the CPA Board. She has also created her own opportunities, like when she created the Student Mentorship program that continues to this day.<\/p>\n\nTAKE FIVE WITH ZARINA GIANNONE<\/h4>\n
\nThere are so many\u2026 psychology is so rich with little tidbits that are mind-boggling, and I\u2019m always impressed with something new. One specific thing might be attribution error. It\u2019s peoples\u2019 tendency to underemphasize situational factors when explaining other peoples\u2019 behaviour, and to over-emphasize personality-based factors or dispositional factors to explain behaviour. The more I work with clients, the more I see that error happening. People attribute the behaviour of other people to being a bad person, or a mean person, versus something that was happening for or to that person in their own context.<\/p>\n
\nI got into soccer very early, before I was 5. I played with an older age group, went into the provincial program and then into the youth National program. I got recruited to UBC on scholarship in Grade 12, and played out my scholarship at UBC. I also got a chance to play one season at Cardiff University in the UK. After I came back, I took up boxing and suffered a back strain, and so that changed things a lot \u2013 I play just for fun at this point, I like the co-ed leagues where I can push the guys around. Soccer still holds a huge place in my heart, and I love watching international tournaments whenever they happen. Go Italia!<\/p>\n
\nThis one\u2019s a bit embarrassing\u2026 one of my favourites is Sean Paul. He was really big when I was back in high school. I don\u2019t care where I am, when I hear a Sean Paul song it puts me in a good mood and takes me back. If I could have anyone perform at my wedding, it would be Sean Paul.<\/p>\n
\nOne of my role models, and a person that\u2019s so interesting to me, is Michael Jordan. I\u2019ve always been a huge fan, and I think he is a textbook case study of drive and competitiveness, and obviously his track record of being the best player of all time. I\u2019d love to spend a day in his brain to see how he does it. And I think if we could take a little of that and spread it throughout sports, then sports might change a lot.<\/p>\n
\nI attribute this to my experiences being on the boards I\u2019ve served on. I think it\u2019s in politics. We want so badly to effect change within our field of psychology and we do \u2013 at the individual, group, and sometimes organizational level. But to be able to have that kind of impact on a systems level, on a larger scale, I would love to be able to effect change in that way. To really represent and advocate and be involved in changes that I see as important.\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n