How I spent my summer

Of the three Olympic values – excellence, respect and friendship – it’s the last that might matter the most to Samantha Pang.

A second year master’s student in Human Kinetics who specializes in sport management, Pang spent the entire summer working in the Netherlands researching how to build a marketing strategy to increase the number of visits sport enthusiasts and tourists make to the Olympic Experience, an attraction at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam.

For a very brief moment, Mia Sisic’s eyes well up ever so slightly when asked what she recalls about growing up in a small town in what was still Yugoslavia in the early 1990s during a bitter war that would eventually divide her home country along ethnic and religious lines.

“I remember a lot but I don’t want to talk about it,” she replies with a quick, smiling recovery. “My parents and I still talk about it, but we try to leave that in the past. I do remember being a very happy kid, playing with kids who were Serbian, Muslim and Croatian. It didn’t matter then.”

Like most North American children, Sandra Stephens would have grown up with classic fables such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

How the Crow Became Black was a new one on her. A fourth-year English major with a minor in anthropology, Stephens came across two variations of the tale this summer while she was researching First Nations oral traditions on the Wasauksing Ojibwe reserve near Parry Sound, Ontario.