What career advice do you live by? Who gave it to you?
A: I have two female mentors who have been pivotal in my journey so far. The first is Pat Corkum; she is a legend at Acadia. She is known to be tough but well-respected and is an incredible advocate for our profession. One of the best pieces of advice she gave me was to "get up as early as possible in the morning before your kids get up." This is how I found the time to complete my MBA while my children were young. She also taught me that teaching is never a popularity contest, and I took that to mean I should always be my authentic self and stand by my values and ethics, even if it feels unpopular at the time.
My other mentor is Jane Roy. Although I cannot pinpoint any specific advice, her actions and how she has treated me has taught me so much. For instance, when my two boys were young, and I was trying to juggle everything, I told her I was going to have to step away from the board at Catapult, and she told me, "No. Take the time you need, step away, but please come back when you are ready". She showed me that it is ok that we are not always in the perfect part of our life, and we can step back, take a break, and come back better than before.
What has been your biggest professional accomplishment to date?
A: my biggest professional achievement was completing my MBA with my two young kids while working full time at the beginning of Covid. There were sacrifices that were made, and it took a lot of discipline, so that feels like the biggest professional accomplishment, and that is what led me to achieve and obtain the tenure track appointment as an Assistant Professor at Acadia without a PhD.
S: My biggest professional accomplishment was my second-to-last job before I retired. In the early 2000s, Dalhousie developed the Health Mentors' Program. They found community volunteers with chronic conditions and disabilities and paired them with interprofessional teams of students from different health fields. I knew the Dean of Medicine at the time, and he approached me about spearheading the project. It was a huge undertaking. Dalhousie had a total of 17 health-related programs and over 800 students participating in the project, and over 180 community volunteers. I had to have faculty from all departments find a way to build the project into their curriculum and be committed to working together for it to succeed. The fact that this project worked was a terrific achievement because of the amount of logistics and how many different groups were involved to make the program successful.