Posted: July 5, 2024
Fifteen years after completing my MA in Dal's Department of Political Science, I am thrilled to be reconnecting with the department as I prepare to move my family from Sudbury to Halifax to start a new position as a mental health policy analyst with the Department of National Defence (DND).
My journey post-grad school was atypical, reflecting my strong intuition at the time that while I had excellent research and critical thinking skills, there was an experiential dimension to life that I was missing. At the time, I endured much well-meant advice from my thesis advisor Dr. Jerome Davis [former Dal faculty member and Canada Research Chair in Oil and Gas Regulation] to get on with the business of a PhD or job in finance or government, but to borrow from Douglas Adams, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
After grad school, I took a humanities and social sciences teaching position at a university in Beijing to complement my thesis research on China's national oil companies with street-level experience. I spent three and a half years in the PRC, writing numerous articles on Chinese politics and society. I then watched the country change for the worse when Xi Jinping took power and subsequently returned home. I was eager for more challenging direct experiences, this time in my home country, and so trained as a Primary Care Paramedic (PCP) and later Advanced Care Paramedic (ACP,) to serve my home community in a grassroots way and develop strength of character in the process. I spent close to eight years leading inter-agency emergency response teams and providing high-level prehospital emergency care to the community of Greater Sudbury while raising my two young daughters.
My ability to think critically and navigate public systems were indispensable as I served on the provincial medical advisory board for prehospital care in Ontario as well as in a research position at the Health Sciences North Centre for Prehospital Care (HSN CPC). In these roles I managed to make significant changes to prehospital clinical practice in Ontario through a clinical study and lobbying the Ministry of Health. Being a paramedic with a strong foundation in political science positioned me well as a politician and I ran for the Conservative Party of Canada in the September 2021 election, returning a better result than the party had seen in my riding in any previous election. I left paramedic practice in 2022 as the stress of serving during the pandemic exceeded my mind's ability to cope and I had to leave the field for my own well-being. I applied for the federal Recruitment of Policy Leaders (RPL) program in late 2022 and was accepted into the RPL Emerging Talent Pool in May 2023. I was approached through the pool by a manager at DND in February and signed my employment contract last week.
If a student reading this were to take a lesson from my story it is to not be afraid to be weird and to take the meandering paths in life. Although there are times when I reflect on how much more comfortable my life may have been if I'd carried on to do a PhD or seek public sector policy work in my 20s, I would not trade all the comfort in the world for the confidence and insight that my atypical work experiences have given me, or the tremendous good I have managed to bring to my community. If you do follow your own path, you may mystify the vast majority of people, but my experience is that you can always find those rare spirits in any organization that will see the method behind your madness and will value you all the more for it. To have come full circle from a ϳԹMA to a broad range of unusual experiences and to find myself in a mid-career policy role with DND after it all is a wonderful validation of the art of doing things differently. Perhaps it is finally time to get started on that PhD!