Meet Alumni Sara Osman
After immigrating to Canada, Sara Osman found her voice through I-Think’s Student Leadership Group, using Integrative Thinking to help shape her and her school’s future.
“Student voice is so important. Our group proved that when students are trusted to lead, they create change…with I-Think, you’re not learning content, you're learning how to think.”
When Sara immigrated to Canada in tenth grade, everything felt new. Within a year, she had changed the trajectory of her school and its thousands of students.
Sara was part of the first student cohort in the I-Think and Central Technical School Student Leadership Group. Sara and 12 of her peers used Integrative Thinking, Design Thinking and Playing to Win Strategy to create the school’s strategy, Vision and Mission. Today, she still keeps a printed copy in her room. “It feels like a trophy, an embodiment of our hard work. Teachers and Principals listened to us, celebrated us, and even implemented the changes we recommended. That experience raised my standards for what community and leadership should feel like.”
Though starting fresh wasn’t easy, Sara says it was this Student Leadership Group where she found both community and purpose. “I was new at Central Tech, and I didn’t really have a community yet. The leadership group gave me that. We weren’t just planning events…we were shaping how our school worked. It was such a unique opportunity to work directly with our principal and feel like our voices really mattered.”
The process the group followed introduced Sara to Integrative Thinking tools like the Pro-Pro Chart and Causal Model. These helped her see conflict differently, value multiple perspectives, and approach challenges with empathy. All skills she uses today. Now, nearly three years later, she is a student in the Integrated Science Program at McMaster University, specializing in physics, Sara is building on that foundation. Her program emphasizes research and collaboration over exams, allowing her to work on projects like studying transmissible cancers. Beyond university campus, she’s also applying her leadership skills to other real-world issues. Over the summer, Sara worked as a Public Health Research Assistant at St. Michael’s Hospital. There, her team studied the relationship between park quality and diabetes rates in Toronto and Mississauga, connecting environmental conditions to health outcomes across neighborhoods.
Looking back, Sara sees her time in the Student Leadership Group as a turning point. It wasn’t just about writing a strategy, it was about learning to think, collaborate, and act with courage.
