MJ wins the Dean’s Award of Excellence

Recently graduated MJ student Mariya Postelnyak was awarded this year’s Dean’s Award of Excellence for her writing on Toronto’s loneliness crisis.  

“It was incredibly unexpected, but a really, really happy surprise,” she said​. 

Postelnyak won the award for her Major Research Paper, a cumulative research project graduate journalism students work on throughout their degree. Postelnyak focused hers on personal experience–many of her close friends were moving out of Toronto due to the city’s housing affordability crisis. 

According to The Canadian Real Estate Association, in 2024 the median home price for a single detached home was roughly $1.2 million. Meanwhile, the average income sits at roughly $61,000, according to Statistics Canada. This information, though jarring to Postelnyak, reflected trends she was seeing in both her personal life and on the news. 

“Those two [facts] combined really motivated me to look at how the housing crisis is impacting our personal relationships with our friends, our sense of community, where people are living and how are they're trying to keep those connections alive with the people that they might have left in Toronto,” said Postelnyak.

For Postelnyak, her MRP was the largest, most thorough journalistic endeavour she’d ever taken on.

“It was a lot of coffee-filled all-nighters,” said Postelnyak.

One of the biggest challenges with the project was the sheer scope of it and detailing the different ways people were affected by Toronto’s housing crisis. 

“For example, I started with the story of my main character who had to move out of Toronto to Windsor and saw his friendships fall apart,” said Postelnyak. “It was easier to tackle when you think about it in these smaller stories that make up the bigger story of the housing crisis in Canada, in Toronto specifically.” 

Postelnyak graduated in June and is now working at The Globe and Mail.