Leaving a legacy
The Agnes Benidickson Tricolour Award is one of Queen’s University’s highest honours. And two of this year’s recipients are business students.
Tara Rezvan, BCom’23, MSc’24, and Meena Waseem, Comm’24, were recognized for their leadership, character, service and impact on the Queen’s community. They join a list of 500 alumni winners spanning more than eight decades who have been inducted into the Tricolour Society, including past Smith recipients like long-time marketing professor Ken Wong, BCom’75, MBA’76, and Dragons’ Den TV star Michele Romanow, MBA’08, BSc(Eng)’07.
Rezvan’s decision to get involved at Queen’s was inspired by those who came before her. “I wanted to be a part of all the great initiatives that they had started . . . a lot of times these initiatives get passed down from older generations. Being a part of that legacy is really inspiring.”
Along the way, Rezvan helped launch a new initiative at Smith. As ComSoc president, she wanted to expand students’ job perspectives beyond the traditional corporate career. That search led her to Smith’s research office and to form the Research Impact Hub. It introduces undergraduate students to business research and to research careers in both academia and industry.
“Looking back to first, second and third year, I didn’t know academic research in business schools was a thing, let alone a pathway that you could pursue a career in,” she says. Rezvan is now completing her Master of Science in Management (a research-driven program) at Smith and will continue on to get her PhD at Smith.
For Waseem, lived experience motivated her to help close gaps at the university and improve the system for current and future students. Each time she encountered a personal challenge, she asked how she could help ease the burden for other students.
Waseem worked with a team of students to advocate for equitable developments in admissions, curriculum and financial aid in the Commerce program. She’s particularly proud of her work to establish the university’s first-ever Ramadan-in-Residence initiative. For the next 20 years, Ramadan will fall during either the fall or winter school semester, which poses a challenge for Muslim students.
“Queen’s really needed a system to support first-year students who are observing Ramadan while living in residence,” Waseem explains. “That means a lot of logistics with the dining halls . . . and thinking about how students can maximize the value of their meal plan so that they’re still getting nutritious food while also not having to compromise observing their faith.”
Humbled to be recognized, Waseem says it is the community that will benefit most from future students who, in learning about the award recipients and their contributions, will go on to make their own impact at Queen’s.
“I really hope people see that this type of initiative is valued here.”