Sonal’s Story

Amanda: This is Ryerson Rewind — a podcast featuring alumni, sharing their fondest memories from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Sonal: My name is Sonal Bhadane, and I have a Masters in Biomedical Physics from Toronto Metropolitan University and I graduated in 2012. Biomedical Physics stood out because of it’s department and as I was growing up I found out that there were very few girls in my class that were doing subjects like physics and mathematics obviously and so I thinking, this shouldn’t be the situation in the world today that we live in so but at Toronto Metropolitan University I felt we had a good number of females, which was refreshing to see, that females were being encouraged to come in and I think Toronto Metropolitan University believes in diversity and inclusion and that is why we see a lot more females in these Physics and Science subjects that traditionally are not considered for female populations. That is what Toronto Metropolitan University is doing, they are giving them an equal opportunity to make sure that these higher educations we do enter and we stay there. My son is 13 months old now and his name is Ansh, and every meeting that I’m in he has something to say to everybody so that is him trying to make contact with you guys. At Toronto Metropolitan University the recreation centre was one of my best places to find peace when I was very stressed. Before my defence I was actually playing squash for two hours just before my defence. So i think, I really think and I encourage everybody to do that, even the current students that are there just find your passion and destress yourself before you go to these situations like your committee meetings or your defences or exams or anything, it really works. Even now it works for me, all the time, I always get stressed at work and if I go and play at a squash court for half an hour it just distresses me. But I found a new passion now, which again is, is coming from Toronto Metropolitan University, believe it or not, Yoga. One of my colleagues was doing Yoga a lot and I met her at Toronto Metropolitan University and she would do Yoga in her lab. Biomedical Physics labs were a lot more spacious then you would imagine as the set the set up of the lab. There would be electrical wires but they’re all hidden. So when I say Yoga in the lab it’s more of a, just like a warm up, we would just put up a little mattress on the ground and do our stretches a little bit and that's about it and then we went back to work. I do at some point consider a little bit of a failure of myself because I didn’t go ahead and do my PhD but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world because I want to be able to do a PhD eventually, and say look, even though I leaked out, I am back in the game now.  

Amanda: This podcast is a production of the Ryerson University Alumni Association. I’m Amanda Cupido, a proud member of the board of directors, and the producer and editor of this podcast. For more stories like the one you just heard visit torontomu.ca/alumni.