Reflections on Grad Studies

Tomorrow I will defend my thesis for my Master of Science in Community and Population Health Science at the University of Saskatchewan. At the end of this stage of my career, I would like to reflect on what a great experience it’s been.

In 2017 I had a great job with a large company. I’d worked there for nearly seven years and it had provided me with many amazing opportunities and challenges, but I was starting to feel like something was going off track. While the work was still exciting and challenging and I loved my co-workers, I was getting tired. My mental health was declining and I couldn’t quite put my finger on the root cause, but knew I needed to take a step back and sort it out. I began looking for other opportunities and settled on academics.

I spent a couple of months working as a research assistant in the lab where I’d do my masters’ project before starting the academic program in fall 2017. It was totally different from what I’d worked on previously and presented many new frustrations and challenges, but overall I can’t say enough good things about the experience.

I learned how to do research, which gave me a whole new lens for looking at problems. Aside from my first semester where I took four classes (plus two weekly seminars), the program allowed a lot of flexibility and I was able to get back on track mentally. I am not sure I’m ever going to be cut out for traditional full-time employment again, but during my schooling I also worked at two different casual positions and am thinking I’ll be pretty happy with the consultant life going forward.

I had the best supervisor I could have asked for, and learned so much from her - not just about how to be a good researcher but how to be a professional, inclusive leader when you have an extremely diverse and ever-changing team. In industry, you hope your team stays the same as long as possible, where in academia you know people won’t be around longer than 4-5 years. As such you have to get to know people quickly and start working hard out of the gate.

A friend who had taken a similar path, i.e. left a big corporate job for an academic “break” a couple years before me provided the advice to just “apply for everything” during the program. “There’s a lot of travel funding that less people than you’d think apply for” she said. And she was right – I had the opportunity to attend six conferences over two years, three of which were paid for by non-academic sources that I applied to. I travelled to Italy (twice!), New Orleans, Minneapolis, Vancouver, and Quebec City, where I presented my work, met interesting people, and gained new perspectives about how different industries and countries solve problems related to occupational health and safety.

There’s so much more I could mention, but we’d be here for weeks. To say this experience was life-changing barely does it justice – it honestly impacted every nook and cranny of my life in a positive way. While it’s time to move on, I hope to keep my foot in the door of academics, and will look back on this leg of my career as extremely formative. I’m so glad I did this.