Through her devoted volunteering, Victoria Cowan received Saskatchewan’s first National Student Fellowship.

Victoria Cowan’s love of volunteering and community involvement has led her to be the first University of Saskatchewan student to receive a 3M National Student Fellowship.

The fellowship was launched in 2012 to honour undergraduate students in Canadian universities who excel as leaders both in and out of the classroom.

The award grants Cowan $5,000 along with a trip to Sydney, N.S. for a conference run by the organization that, along with 3M, is responsible for the fellowship: the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Recipients of the fellowship are also invited to a program retreat separate from the conference.

Each component is meant to give the recipients further opportunities in both learning and educating across Canada.

Cowan has lived in Saskatoon for most of her life and first started volunteering while she was in high school. Of her volunteer activities, Cowan says she prefers to call them “volunteerism, or maybe you could even call it activism, although I didn’t know it at that age.” Her high school commitments included being part of an environmental club and co-founding a book club.

However, this was just the beginning of Cowan’s involvement. The number of groups and communities she has been involved in is staggering.

She first started volunteering at the U of S with learning communities, helping students make the transition from high school to university.

From there she began working with the community service learning program on alternative reading week. ARW is a community-based program intended to teach through experience using three components: “knowledge, action, and reflection.”

I had to reflect not only my own leadership… but the leadership of those who inspired me who could have easily been in this position as well.

The Otesha Project, a Canadian charity that encourages sustainable living, has made a big impact on Cowan’s life. In 2012 she committed herself to a strictly vegan diet and worked to reduce her human footprint by using only a bike for transportation — no vehicles allowed —as she traveled along the East coast. She said the experience was life-changing and something she wrote about in her application for the national fellowship.

Cowan is currently working with Inspired Minds, a creative writing program for inmates at the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre. It is another experience she describes as “life-changing.”

The list of Cowan’s accolades goes on from there. Just before she learned she had been awarded the national fellowship, she received the Vera Pezer volunteering award from the U of S Students’ Union.

Cowan credits the help of others for her success, saying there is “never a sole author in success,” and adding that a huge group of people supported her endeavour. Wenona Partridge, who worked with Cowan on the Fellowship, noted the support as “being consistent with her leadership.”

Cowan said the application experience for the fellowship “was the most grueling yet gratifying thing that I have ever done.”

The application she had to write “needed to be a unified narrative, [and] a personal narrative of [her] vision of leadership.” She also needed letters of support.

“It feels incredibly humbling,” Cowan said about being the first student in Saskatchewan to receive the award.

“Throughout this process I had to reflect not only my own leadership… but the leadership of those who inspired me who could have easily been in this position as well.”

When asked for inspiring words for other students looking to apply for the fellowship next year, Cowan encouraged students to put themselves out there.

“I think really write from the centre of who you are. When doing anything, always write from your heart because in that sense it will always be authentic. Regardless of the outcome, it is always going to be something that you are proud of.”

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Photo: Supplied