Ready, Steady, Go
I found it tucked in an old photo album, a photograph of myself at six, caught mid-stride in that eternal “ready, steady, go” pose that defined so many small-town 
Ontario summers. There I am in a homemade dress, white ankle socks pulled high, hair held back with a stretchy hair band, surrounded by other little girls in shorts and T-shirts. We’re about to race across some forgotten field near Georgian Bay, and I know, with the particular certainty of childhood memory, that I won.
I won because I was fast, yes, but mostly because my mother was on the sidelines, her voice cutting through the humid air: “Go! Go! Go!” There was never a question of not trying, not winning, not being exactly as capable as anyone else. She’d been a standout on Ontario’s provincial women’s field hockey team, and she raised me with the fierce assumption that being female meant nothing less than everything.
That photograph came to mind as we shaped the fall 2025 issue around the theme of capability. Our STEM feature reveals how young women are rewriting the equations in physics and mathematics. The Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic continues that legacy of determination, empowering women to seek justice when the system has failed them.
But capability isn’t only about breaking barriers. Sometimes it’s about breakthroughs that change how we care for ourselves and each other, as seen in researchers at York modelling the spread of the Zika virus and developing wearable technology for preventive health. Or sometimes capability is found in individual nerve and imagination, as when York alum Jerry Levitan turned a chance encounter with John Lennon in a Toronto hotel room into decades of creative risk.
From the Nat Taylor Cinema nurturing Canada’s next filmmakers, to Angela Pacienza, who rose from Excalibur’s student paper to executive editor at the Globe and Mail, to York engineers pioneering additive manufacturing and printed electronics for custom prosthetics, this issue celebrates the particular satisfaction of work well done.
That little girl in the photograph ran because she had to. York alumni, faculty and researchers create, discover and persist because they can. ■
— Deirdre Kelly