Advising, Mentorship, and Networking: Navigating Higher Education.
Saturday, April 9th, 3-4PM (EST).
Join us for an online panel discussion on Advising, Mentorship, and Networking: Navigating Higher Education. Moderated by Professor Uzma Z. Rizvi, our panelists, Drs Jaffery, Momin-Rizvi, and Riaz will talk through real-life examples of these three aspects as they relate to higher education. The main aim of advising (undergraduate and graduate) is to help students develop strategies for success and helps them understand the curriculum, the purpose of their academic program, and encourages and nurtures self-motivation, self-direction, problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Mentorship teaches the mentee how to trust their own decisions, and how to sift through information about career choices, and pathways forward. And finally, time and time again, research has shown that one’s (non-monetary) net worth is an accumulative understanding of their network, their reach, and their influence within a field. Networking helps our students find opportunities to advance their careers. In each of these cases, finding support and assistance is key, and our panelists will talk through their own experiences and what they have learned along the way.
This event is geared towards students and parents, as it provides strategies of how to move towards securing academic success.
Zafreen Jaffery
Ed.D Senior Evaluation Associate at Behavioral Science Research Institute.
Zafreen Jaffery holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership specializing in curriculum and instruction from Portland State University. She has more than two decades of professional experience in helping practitioners and policymakers use data and research evidence to solve complex problems. As a Senior Evaluation Associate at Behavioral Science Research Institute, she supports clients to improve access to equitable education and healthcare by contributing expertise in qualitative, mixed methods research and evaluation to help close achievement and opportunity gaps. She is a visiting faculty member at the Florida International University’s Women and Gender Studies department and serves as the Secretary for Miami-Dade County Public School System’s Student Health Advisory Committee.
Shazia Momin-Rizvi
(Ed.D.- Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership with a specialization in Curriculum and Instruction)- Special Educator, Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Maryland
Shazia Momin-Rizvi, Ed.D. is a graduate from Hofstra University and the University of Phoenix. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Hofstra University in 2006 in Psychology and dual certification in Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education. In 2008, She earned a Masters of Science Degree from Hofstra University in Special Education: Teaching Children with Disabilities. In 2011, Shazia obtained a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Special Education: Assessment and Diagnosis. Most recently, Shazia completed her Doctoral journey and was awarded a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership with a specialization in Curriculum and Instruction.
As a Special Education Teacher in various counties within the states of New York and Maryland, Shazia had the opportunity to work with a diverse student population. Her students were not only culturally diverse but varying in learning levels, as well. She had the opportunity to teach students with disabilities, such as behavioral, personality, and attention disorders to more severe disabilities like Autism and Intellectual Developmental Disability. She has been a mentor to teacher interns and new educators. She works with teachers, paraeducators, and other support personnel to create learning environments suitable for diverse learners.
Kashif Riaz
is the science advisor at Squigl and Director of Data Engineering at Securian Financial. He has been providing data science and data architecture oversight for more than a decade at various organizations. Kashif is a thought leader for creating data strategies and mobilizing the data programs. He has worked in the Legal, Finance, Risk & Compliance, and Insurance sectors.
Kashif specializes in designing large-scale data architectures to solve complex business initiatives by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Blockchains. He is well-versed in data architecture challenges of legacy data silos, data residency, and data privacy regulations. He is the principal on various state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing initiatives that disrupted well-established systems for search engines and Question Answering algorithms. Besides creating custom solutions, he has deep expertise in using 3rd party AI-based solutions like AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM Watson.
Kashif has a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, focusing on Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, and Linguistics. His research focuses on multilingual Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and given talks at international conferences. He is a recognized expert in computational linguistics for the processing of morphologically rich right to left languages. His algorithms are the benchmark for Named Entity recognition and stemming for Urdu language processing.