Introducing Kevin Lee

Hello everyone, I trust that my Canadian connections are enjoying their well-deserved Family Day holiday, and my American connections are enjoying Presidents’ Day. Given that we are celebrating Family Day in Canada, I would like to take this opportunity introduce my son Kevin Lee.

Kevin is 20 years old and in his third year of studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is completing an Honours Bachelor’s of Science degree with a specialization in Life Sciences, with a view to a career in healthcare.

For the past several years, Kevin has worked in the Emergency Department at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, first as a coop student during high school, and then later as an intake worker while in university. Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is located in Toronto, Canada, and is the largest trauma hospital in Canada in addition to being located in Canada’s most populous urban centre. As a result, if there ever was such an unfortunate thing as Ground Zero for COVID-19 in Canada, it would be there.

When Kevin was finished with school last April (2020), we were at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto. When it came time to think about his summer employment, my wife and I had the initial impression that he didn’t need to work during the summer at Sunnybrook due to the increased risks of Kevin being a front-line worker during the COVID-19 pandemic and Kevin having two younger sisters aged 11 and 5 in the household. When we asked Kevin what he wanted to do, he answered that he wanted to work in the Sunnybrook emergency department as he’d had done in the past. He went on to further say that he felt that it was the calling of the job to help people; that you don’t get to choose when to treat patients, regardless of their illness or the health conditions surrounding them.

We were initially surprised at the strength of his conviction to “go to war” and to serve our community during this healthcare crisis, given that he was only nineteen years old at the time. Like many other families of front-line workers, we wanted to support him as best we could, and we managed to get through it together as a family, while managing to stay safe. We are very proud of him. We have a heightened appreciation of the huge sacrifices made by front-line healthcare workers and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic because of our personal experience.

I have been recently encouraging Kevin to develop a more professionally-oriented presence on LinkedIn. Like all millennials, he is very proficient with and active in social media; in particular, the usual suspects such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, despite being proficient with popular social media, he has been resistant to developing a professional presence on LinkedIn.

As a member of my LinkedIn “family”, I am asking if you can share some LinkedIn “love” with Kevin. Please feel free to engage with him and share any insights into his professional development. Besides, he is more apt to listen to you than me, lol!

With much appreciation,

Grayson