Written by : Rebecca Fisher

Source: Nepean This Week

From August 13 to 31, 28 students from across Canada will visit Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam) for the year 2007 Junior Team Canada trade mission. One of the participants of this year's trade mission is a Barrhaven resident, Jennifer Sarumi, who is currently in her third year of the bachelor of international business program at Carleton University .

"I really didn't expect to get in," she says. "The competition was pretty tough." So when she received a notice during the first week of June, informing her that she had been accepted into the program, she was surprised. With over 800 students from across Canada applying she had not thought that she would be one of the 28 participants involved with the trade mission.

"Basically you have to want it," Ms. Sarumi advises people who are going to apply for the Junior Team Canada trade missions. "They're looking for people who are motivated."

The Junior Team Canada trade missions are organized by Global Vision, a national charitable organization that helps young Canadians prepare to be the leaders of the next generation. The trade missions, which run once every year, send groups of students from across Canada to foreign countries to look for business opportunities on Canada's behalf. The students gain practical knowledge of the business world and foreign markets, especially of developing markets and where Canada stands in the world market. While they are on the trade mission, students will be ambassadors for Canada, and their duties will include developing contracts overseas for their own region's biotech, information technology and education sectors. When the mission ends the students create reports for their sponsors which are also looked at by national companies and organizations to access opportunities in foreign markets. Ms. Sarumi will be representing the Ottawa Region in Southeast Asia this August. "We travel from coast to coast to see who can best represent Canada on the international level." Amy Giroux, director of Global Vision explains. "We selected Jennifer from the hundreds of candidates who applied from the Ottawa Area." Ms. Sarumi, has been interested in a career in business since she was at John McCrae high school. She owns her own business called Perfect Traits, which she has ran since she was in Grade 11, that paints portraits of people based on black and white photos of them. She started Perfect Traits after an art show at John McCrae high school where people became interested in her technique and started to commission paintings from her.

For her first two years at Carleton University she studied economics before transferring to the bachelor of international business program. She has not decided if she will pursue a career in marketing or a career in trading after she graduates. Ms. Sarumi first heard about the Junior Team Canada trade missions, when a student who had been involved in the 2006 trade mission to China spoke to her class about the program. Then she and 60 other students from Carleton University interested in applying went to a Global Leaders Centre offered at Ottawa University on March 26. People from Global Vision, Heritage Canada, former participants of Junior Team Canada trade missions and others talked about the program. Each region in Canada had an interest presentation from Global Vision for one to four days depending on the amount of interested students there were in the area. In total there were 13 Global Leaders Centre offered across Canada this year between early March and mid May. They are held so interested students could decide if they were serious about applying.. Since she still wanted to participate, Ms. Sarumi applied.

Last week Ms. Sarumi went to an orientation meeting for the Junior Team Canada trade mission, where she met the other students involved in the program including one other participant from the Ottawa area. Also, she attended seminars that explained the program in more depth, and worked on pre-program projects and presentations, which gave her an expectation of what she will be doing once she arrives in Southeast Asia . She is excited to be going on the trade mission even though there is a lot more work involved then she expected to have when she applied for the program.

Ms. Sarumi's first two sponsors were in the community, the local Lions Club and the Nepean Kiwanis club.

"I really appreciate the community's support," she says.