UADS Holds Webinar: Maximizing Opportunities ForThe Future

The Unibadan Association of Dental students (UADS) in contributing to the development of her members held a capacity building webinar on Sunday, the 29th of August. The webinar which was live from Zoom involved sessions from three guest speakers on the theme "Maximizing Opportunities for the Future".

The first session featured a discussion on scholarship applications and techniques delivered by Oluwafolajinmi Adesanya. Adesanya, a fellow of the Yong African Leaders Initiative west Africa, 2018 alumnus of Clinton Global Initiative, Chevron Scholar is a Research Assistant at Policy Cures research, Australia and currently a 6th year medical student at the University of Ibadan.

The second speaker, Mr. Akpabio Nseobon Charles, a final year Medicine and Surgery student of the University of Ibadan and a former Research and Marketing Coordinator at Getin Education Consulting discussed the art of cold emails. Akpabio, passionate about social development of young people with a record of organizing events that empowers African students with skills to submit outstanding graduate school applications explained cold emails as “unsolicited emails sent without prior permission or contacts. They are well researched, specific emails sent with clear objectives.” He mentioned that writing cold emails is a means of career and professional development, educational advancement, connecting with experts in one’s field and switching careers or exploring unconventional pathways. He stressed that the elements involved in writing great cold emails include an attention grabbing subject line, a professional introductory paragraph, a clear body and additional considerations. 

The third and final speaker was Mr. Kehinde Muraina, a Medical Laboratory Scientist, Project Associate for Design for Health team at Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) and a co-founder of a Health-Tech startup, CrashAid Africa. He spoke on Curriculum Vitae (CV) writing and development. In an interactive session, he majorly highlighted ways of selling oneself better in a CV description, driving home his point with a relatable example. 

Drawing from his experience in reviewing CVs, he stated that a problem with many CVs is describing the volunteering/experience blandly. He also mentioned that adding Nursery/Primary School education and “maybe” the Secondary education is not necessary as adding the Tertiary education explains the fact that one must have gone through the earlier phases. He explained that most companies looking to employ use the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which is an automated system that screens (all the CVs sent in) for keywords that the company is looking for, for the particular opening they have. Finally, he noted that to pass the CV review stage, one’s CV has to have been tailored to the specific opening requirements to stand a chance of getting selected for an interview. 

The Webinar is one of the capacity building programmes that the current executives of the UADS have promised to deliver to students before the end of this administrative tenure.