Top Stories
Not-so-perfect strangers
How to deal with a roommate who’s the polar opposite
Photo by Chad Hipolito
From the Maclean’s Student Issue—on sale now. Story by Rosemary Counter.
A decade ago, which might as well be a century in technology years, Michelle Titus was like many first-year university students: away from home, stuck in a “teeny tiny, horrible” room, and living with a complete stranger she couldn’t stand.
In her defence, it was a bad match from the start. Titus was popular and outgoing, the soon-to-be relationship columnist at the University of Waterloo’s student paper. Her roommate was an introvert who’d wishfully described herself on her application as a “social butterfly.” “On paper, we should have been the best of friends,” says Titus, now 30. In real life, following some drama worthy of Mean Girls, they were estranged by the end of the year.
Small schools. Big advantages.
Canada’s northern universities have arrived
The library at Nipissing. By Cole Garside.
From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.
It’s the time of year when twelfth graders realize that they need to choose a university—and soon. Let the road trips begin.
But if their travels take them to the libraries at the University of Calgary or Guelph, they may stumble over students sitting on the floors. Study space is in short supply.
If they tour residences at Dalhousie or McGill University, they may find themselves in a converted hotel or see bunks stacked in former study spaces. Each school has had room shortages in recent years.
And if the tourists crash classes at Western or Toronto, they may rethink the whole university thing after they see students shouting to professors in 900-seat halls.
Then again, they may just accept the noisy libraries, overstuffed residences and stadium seating. What else would they expect after the population of Canada’s universities grew by 50 per cent in the past 15 years?
Not every campus has been so squeezed. If applicants tour the new library at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont., they’ll walk past students sprawled on plush benches, deep in concentration under natural light.
If they tour either of Laurentian University’s new residences on its Sudbury, Ont., campus, they’ll find enough space to accommodate not just all first-years who apply, but many second- and third-year students too.
If they check out the pristine classrooms at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George, they’ll see most classes have fewer than 25 students.
It’s not that Canada’s small northern campuses haven’t grown too. The difference is these campuses were so small they had plenty of room to grow. A decade ago, they couldn’t afford some basic amenities. But as the big southern schools show their age, Canada’s northern schools have arrived.
“A lot of universities are crowded and suffering from huge deferred maintenance,” says Ken Steele, a post-secondary marketing guru with consultancy Academica Group. “They have a lot of older infrastructure, and students are noticing.”
There is, of course, such a thing as being too new. In 2002, Nipissing was 10 years old and students joked that it was just like a high school; with a population of 1,960 full-time students and a one-building campus of brown brick and lockers, it felt like one. A school that size couldn’t afford much. But as the school approaches 4,000 full-time students, it’s got enough per-student government funding to afford its $25-million library, a new sports facility, and double the amount of lab space that it started with.
Lesley Lovett-Doust, Nipissing’s president, says the institution’s relative youth has also allowed it to leapfrog over its peers. “The old schools are retrofitting old libraries, sending tonnes of books into storage to try to open up their libraries for collaboration,” she says. “We skipped that phase.”
Ashley Ryan, a 2008 science graduate, now works as a lab technologist at Nipissing. “Even in the past four years, I’ve noticed a huge change,” she says. Recently, the school purchased an electron microscope, a huge benefit for Ryan, who took up microscope photography as a hobby. It also helps young students, because Nipissing is small enough that they have access to the equipment.
It’s not just per-student funding that has helped these schools flourish. Philanthropists now see them as a good bet too. Nipissing received a $15-million donation in 2010. Laurentian, which has added $140 million in new buildings since 2005, attracted a $10-million gift for its engineering school in late 2011.
“There aren’t a lot of $10-million-plus donations out there,” says Steele, the marketer. “Ten million dollars added to a smaller institution makes a bigger difference than at a larger institution.”
Dominic Giroux, the president of Laurentian, agrees. Big urban schools pay hefty prices for land. Some, like the University of Ottawa, struggle to find land at all. Giroux has plenty at his disposal. “That’s just one of the advantages of having a 750-acre campus,” he says.
New facilities, in turn, attract new researchers, like Kevin Hutchings, the $500,000 Canada Research Chair in literature, culture and environmental studies at UNBC (pop. 3,700).
When he was offered the job in 2000, he was taken by the physical beauty of the then-six-year-old campus. His peers at McMaster and Western warned him against working at an unproven institution. But now, 18 years after its founding, UNBC is proven: it’s No. 1 in total research dollars among primarily undergraduate schools in the 2011 Maclean’s rankings.
Since Hutchings arrived, he’s watched an interdisciplinary research community bloom.
In 2011, UNBC profs earned $1.9 million more in prestigious new Canada Research Chair funding. Simon Fraser, a school six times larger, added $2.4 million. It’s evidence of how schools like UNBC, Nipissing and Laurentian are the poor cousins no more.
As Ken Steele puts it, “the upstarts now have the advantage.”
Studying abroad? You’ll want to read this.
Returning can be fraught with bureaucratic hurdles
From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.
Story by Ian Bethune.
Two years ago, as a 21-year-old fine arts student at York University, I embarked on one of the great times of my life, a third-year overseas exchange at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. I went into this concentrating on the expected hurdles—booking flights, arranging lodging, selecting classes, finding my footing on the other side of the world—and discovered the really hard part took place long before I stepped on the plane. Wandering wide-eyed about Adelaide was nothing compared with the uncoordinated demands of two Byzantine university bureaucracies.
But I survived the existential struggle with the paperwork and thrived on the exchange, an unforgettable experience I’d recommend to anyone. I also developed the laughable idea that going home would be—new Australian phrase I learned—“a piece of piss.” After all, what could be difficult about returning to my home and familiar native land?
Marjorie Johnson, top of her class
Celebrating Canada’s 3M Teaching Fellows
Photo by Andrew Tolson
Marjorie Johnson is just one of the ten 3M Teaching Fellows announced in the annual Maclean’s student issue, on sale this week. To see who the other nine winners are, click here.
Story by Gustavo Vieira.
A soothing guitar ballad is piped through the sound system, muffling the chatter of a few dozen second-year kinesiology students; they’re waiting for anatomy class to begin at an auditorium at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. A slide show reviewing the body parts studied in previous classes plays on a loop: the medial pterygoid, trunks of brachial plexus, the maxillary artery, and so on. Two minutes later, the lights dim; a clip from Grey’s Anatomy appears, depicting a blood-gushing patient being treated by a frazzled young medical resident struggling to contain the bleeding. The students go silent. It’s time for Marjorie Johnson to start her lecture on the intricate anatomy of the human neck. Not before she pulls up a photo of Steve Nash, the Phoenix Suns superstar, his neck’s veins, muscles and nerves bulging beneath his skin as he protects the ball from an opponent at a basketball game. “He’s one of my heroes,” Johnson later confesses, “so they see Steve Nash a lot.”
The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2011 results
Survey shows student satisfaction at 25 schools
The annual CUSC survey measures student satisfaction. In 2011, a questionnaire was issued to a random sample of approximately 1,000 undergraduates at each of 25 participating schools. In total, more than 8,500 students responded to questions about everything from academics to support services. Here are the results you’ll want to see if you’re considering one of these schools.
Continue reading The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2011 results
How students rate their experiences at 62 Canadian schools
Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement
Click on the charts below to see results from the 2011 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a study that university administrators pore over each year to find out how their students are learning. Both first and senior-year students have answered questions that illustrate how well their universities performed on the five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice: level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning, enriching educational experience, and supportive campus environment. You may be surprised about who’s on top. It’s not always the same schools that rank highly in the Maclean’s University Rankings.
Select a chart below. On the next screen, place your cursor over the chart and click to enlarge.
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- Active and Collaborative Learning
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- Enriching Educational Experience
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- Level of Academic Challenge
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- Student-Faculty Interaction
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- Supportive Campus Environment
Students aren’t getting the facts about marijuana
Research shows links to mental illness, lung capacity
Photo by Yeshe on Flickr
When sociologist and drug-policy expert Andy Hathaway surveyed one of his first-year classes at the University of Guelph last fall, 80 per cent of students reported experience with cannabis.
Hathaway cautions that it was only a small pilot study (around 100 responses), and it took place at Guelph, which is, let’s face it, “a bit granola.”
Still, that 80 per cent figure isn’t surprising.
When twelfth graders are asked if they’ve tried marijuana, roughly half say yes.
Provincial rates of lifetime usage now range from a low of 40 per cent of Albertan twelfth-graders to a high of 63 per cent of those in Nova Scotia, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. And that’s before university.
Smoking pot can’t be considered deviant anymore, says Hathaway. It’s simply the new normal.
A loosening of cultural attitudes, particularly in the media, helps explains the shift. “We had Cheech and Chong in the 1970s, but that was a very stereotypical portrayal,” says Hathaway. “Now we have shows like Weeds that show use of marijuana by very regular people—soccer moms and dads.”
But as attitudes toward marijuana soften, some campus health experts report that they’re more worried about students using the drug than ever. That’s because research increasingly shows links between marijuana and the number one health problem on Canadian campuses: mental illness.
Dr. Elizabeth Osuch, a psychiatrist who runs the First Episode Mood and Anxiety Program at a hospital in London, Ont., encounters mentally ill students who offer their own evidence of marijuana-related problems. “I hear the story frequently about how ‘I get paranoid when I smoke pot’, ‘I get anxious when I smoke pot’, or ‘I’ve been smoking pot a long time and now I’m depressed’,” she says.
That’s not surprising to Dr. Osuch. What’s surprising to her is how surprising that is to others.
“I’ve given talks across this community and when I talk about the effects of marijuana, it’s news to people,” she says, “unless I’m talking to a group of clinicians who interact with people in a medical or counselling setting. They know, because they’ve been seeing this for years.”
The best-established risk is that marijuana can trigger or exacerbate psychosis in a small number of people who are susceptible, based on their genes. To some, the link is not even debatable. “A number of prospective epidemiological studies put it beyond doubt that cannabis use increases the subsequent risk of schizophrenia,” wrote the authors of a 2007 review in Addictive Disorders.
Devastating as psychosis may be for those who experience it, diseases like schizophrenia only affect a small proportion of the population. But Dr. Osuch warns that marijuana may also be contributing to the most common health problems on Canadian campuses: depression and anxiety.
One study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2007 followed a group of 14 to 17-year-olds over a decade, checking up on their mental health and drug use along the way. They found that depression, bipolar disorder and, to a lesser extent, anxiety disorders, all coincided with previous cannabis use—and more use predicted more illness.
But that’s only the beginning. “I would predict that there will be more and more information out there in the coming years looking at the problematic effects of what’s no longer a ‘soft drug’,” says Dr. Osuch, who notes that there’s more Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in in marijuana today than ever.
Dr. Osuch is currently the lead researcher on one such study exploring the links to depression. She explains the theory behind that possible link: “Marijuana is very active on the neurocirciutry of reward processing. Anything that you do because you like doing it activates reward processing in the brain,” she says. “And if you slam that neurological system daily with a chemical [like THC], it becomes very difficult for the person to feel reward from doing normal things,” she adds.
Dr. Osuch is quick to point out that not everyone who smokes pot will have a problem. “But a significant percentage of them will,” she says, adding, “as long as you know what those percentages are, or a sense of what the risks are, you can make an intelligent decision.”
Right now, the students she meets when giving talks at the Western University in or London, Ont. high schools haven’t gotten the message. They perceive pot-smoking as low risk.
Part of the confusion is the conflicting messages young people get when they type “marijuana health effects” into Google. “What they’re getting is all kind of sites that say marijuana is great,” says Dr. Osuch, “what they aren’t getting is the scientific research.”
There are, of course, some well-funded and easy-to-find meassages about the risks online—those from the federal government. But Hathaway, the drug policy researcher at Guelph, says the federal government’s anti-drug messages aren’t trusted by youth, because they exaggerate the risk.
In one of the federal ads, called Fast Forward, a blonde boy refuses a puff on a joint after he envisions a life of violence and trouble with the law. In another ad, called Mirror, a girl in her bedroom ends up cutting her arm with a piece of glass after taking some unidentified drugs.
Such scare tactics cause teens to tune out drug messaging entirely, says Hathaway. “If you’re sending inaccurate messages about marijuana when they have enough experience to know this is basically propaganda, they’re going to have doubts about any message of that kind,” he explains.
Although Hathaway doesn’t advocate abstinence like Dr. Osuch, he does believe there’s room for better education about marijuana. “Effective social policy would account for the small minority who may run into trouble with drugs and be candidates for some kind of intervention,” says Hathaway.
The government might do better to educate youth about the dangers of smoking tobacco along with marijuana, for example, says Hathaway. Tobacco is known to reduce lung capacity and increase the risk of cancer. Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January showed that smoking two to three joints actually increases lung capacity.
But because the JAMA article portrays marijuana as less harmful, it’s unlikely to would make it into the government’s messaging. Once again, the science is unlikely to reach young Canadians.
And if there’s one thing Dr. Osuch and Prof. Hathaway agree on, it’s that young people need better access to the facts. That way, they can determine the risks for themselves—whatever they may be.
You could be the next Maclean’s On Campus blogger
Seeking opinionated students who can write
Photo by Aaron Jacobs on Flickr
HURRY: THE DEADLINE IS NOW FEB. 2.
Maclean’s On Campus is Canada’s daily source for higher education news, opinion and advice.
To keep the conversation fresh, we rely a team of bloggers who are filing reports and columns from Cape Breton University to UBC in Vancouver.
We’re excited to announce that we’re ready to add a couple of new regular voices. The problem is, we’re not sure who they’ll be. So how about you?
Here’s the deal. Our bloggers are student journalists who tell us what’s changing on their campuses and in higher education nationwide.
They contribute one post minimum per week. It may be a straight-up news story one week, an opinion piece the next, an advice column the week after—anything that will interest our readers.
But who are those readers? They range from high school students who are considering attending post-secondary schools to university presidents, but most of them are current students themselves.
Stories with audio, video and photographs are encouraged, but not required. No experience is necessary, so long as you can prove that you’ve got good ideas and are capable of writing well.
So what’s in it for you? Unlike many blogs sites, we pay a fee for each post. Blogging may also count toward course requirements. But above all, it’s an opportunity to influence the conversation.
To apply, click on “Contact Us” at the top of the screen and send us a message. Tell us a bit about yourself, suggest a couple of news story that you think our readers would read and suggest some opinion pieces you’d like to write. Be sure to include contact information.
Good luck,
Josh Dehaas
Editor, Maclean’s On Campus
Teacher’s college applications plummet
Nine per cent drop in Ontario
Photo by cdsessums on Flickr
The Ontario College of Teachers sounded the alarm bells in 2011 about the gap between the number of graduating teachers and the shrinking number of jobs available. Their survey of new graduates showed 24 per cent were unemployed and only one-third were employed full-time.
John Milloy, the minister in charge, reacted by taking the unprecedented step of capping the number of first-year education students at 9,058.
This week, new statistics show that students got the message. The Ontario University Application Centre reports that provincial teacher’s colleges received 8.9 per cent fewer applicants in 2012.
Some schools saw huge declines. Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont. got 15.8 per cent fewer applications. Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. got 21.5 per cent fewer applications.
There’s a new social media obsession on campus
And it’s a haven for racist, sexist trolls
Facebook. Twitter. MSN. Google Plus. There’s no shortage of places for students to chat, opine, or procrastinate during finals. Yet there’s a new digital obsession spreading across Canadian campuses. It’s called OMG and it’s simple. Students submit short “Oh My Gods” about anything. Then, they’re posted to the site.
As a Waterloo student who found myself distracted by OMGUW far too often in December, I got thinking about what makes it so hard to look away. I wanted to know what makes it so enticing that it has spread from Waterloo to Guelph, Saskatchewan and Toronto, with tens of thousands of views.
Continue reading There’s a new social media obsession on campus
10 Summer Job Search Tips for Students
It’s January. You better start looking now!
Career fair by SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget on Flickr
The end of the school year may seem far off, but it’s only about five months away. And as surprising as it may seem in January, most employers who hire students for the summer are already recruiting. That means you better get your job strategy ready. Here’s advice to search smarter.
1. Crack the hidden job market
Most jobs aren’t advertised. They’re given to the boss’s son, the boss’s wife’s niece or the guy who was smart enough to offer his resume just when the employer was considering expansion. Start your search by asking friends and family if they know anyone who might hire a student.
Families weren’t confused: minister
CFS says Ontario Liberals misled voters about new grant
Minister Glen Murray. By Shaun Merritt on Flickr.
The Canadian Federation of Students (Ontario) has accused the Liberal government of “broken promises” and misleading voters about who would be eligible for a substantial new tuition credit.
But Glen Murray, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, tells On Campus that the CFS-O are “the only people who seem confused.”
The Liberals, who were re-elected to a minority government on Oct. 6, campaigned on a new tuition grant amounting to $1,600 per year for university students and $730 for college students.
Today, the CFS-O issued a statement saying the Liberals misled students because the grant only applies to full-time undergraduates and college students in first-entry programs who are from families that make under $160,000 per year.
The 10 biggest stories in Canadian higher education
The (surprisingly) most-read stories of 2011
Photo by Kelly Finnamore on Flickr
Each year, we offer Maclean’s On Campus readers a look back at the Top 10 most-read higher education news stories of the year. There were two big themes in 2011. First, the many scandals over universities’ reputations, from Alberta to Queen’s to St. FX. Second, uncertainty about the job market for grads.
1. Time for this year’s edition of X-ring Idol
Our blogging English professor, Todd Pettigrew, dared to compare the obsession of St. Francis Xavier students with their beloved X-ring to Gollum’s unhealthy quest for the precious. We knew St. FX students would defend their tradition vociferously—and they did, with more than 250 comments over three days. Most were from alumni and students who thought Pettigrew missed the point. They argued that the ring symbolizes their hard work and the family-like bond they instantly glean whenever a fellow X-grad catches a glimpse of their band. Then again, dozens of readers agreed with Pettigrew—some even suggested the flood of emotional reactions reinforced his point.
Continue reading The 10 biggest stories in Canadian higher education
Why smart profs want students to use Wikipedia
It encourages research, citation, revision…
Photo by Kalexanderson on Flickr
Wikipedia is an outcast on most university campuses. At the beginning of the semester, most professors mention that it’s banished from essays and assignments. If you dare to include a Wikipedia article on your reference list, you’re practically asking for a zero on your bibliography. In extreme cases, your professor might set your essay on fire and scatter the ashes across the Pacific Ocean. That’s because most profs regard Wikipedia’s crowdsourced articles as unreliable.
Despite the website’s reputation, some professors at schools like the University of Alberta are using Wikipedia as a teaching resource. Never mind using Wikipedia as a reference: these profs are actually replacing traditional essays with assignments where students write Wikipedia entries.
Continue reading Why smart profs want students to use Wikipedia
Scientists narrow in on hunt for ‘God particle’
Canadian university researchers among international team
Photo of Large Hadron Collider courtesy of CERN
Two teams of nearly 3,000 scientists from around the world, including researchers from 10 Canadian universities, announced this week a new milestone in the hunt for the Higgs boson, a particle that explains the existence of mass.
Scientists at the CERN Physics Research Centre in Geneva, Switzerland presented evidence on Dec. 13 pointing to the existence of the Higgs boson, coined the “God particle” by the American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman.
The teams worked independently for 21 months inside the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, to re-create the conditions at the time of the creation of the universe—the Big Bang. The experiments produced the same results: scientists determined that the Higgs boson has a mass between 128 and 525 gigaelectron volts, in the lower regions of the energy field.
The researchers are quick to point out that the news another step in the process, not a definitive discovery. Still, University of Toronto physicist Robert Orr tells the Toronto Star we owe a lot to the elusive Higgs boson: “The whole world we live in is based on the science of electromagnetism. Our whole society has evolved from that: iPads, cameras, lights, computers.”
Where the rich kids go
Guess which universities get the least student financial aid
From Queen's Players "I go to Queen's!"
You know the stereotype that Queen’s University attracts rich kids? The one played up in this recent viral video in which a student jokes: “I don’t know what financial aid is, but Queen’s has it.”
Well, if the number of students receiving financial assistance is any indication, it’s very likely true.
Queen’s University has the lowest number of students receiving Ontario Student Assistance in the province: only 29.6 per cent of students.
Contrast that to Nipissing University in the relatively poorer north of Ontario, where twice as many—59.6 per cent—get loans. It’s almost as high at Trent University—59.3 per cent.
It’s a rough time to be a Bachelor of Fine Arts
Few jobs. Shut programs. How art schools are adapting.
Artist photo by chadmagiera on Flickr
Christina McKenzie is pretty typical of Bachelor of Fine Arts graduates these days. She doesn’t regret taking a BFA at York University (2005). She’s grateful for the four years she spent exploring photography, bronze-casting, painting, drawing, book-making, sculpture and art history.
But there’s another part of her that wishes she’d taken something more focused, like photography or design, perhaps. Had she done that, who knows where she’d be?
McKenzie had planned to become an art teacher after her BFA. She was even accepted to a teacher’s college, but deferred it. She’s very glad she did. At least a quarter of her art school colleagues went on to teacher’s college. Many can’t find jobs. In fact, two-thirds of new teaching graduates in Ontario can’t find work as teachers.
Continue reading It’s a rough time to be a Bachelor of Fine Arts
University of Toronto tutorials are too big
What good is a lab or tutorial with 50 or 100 students in it?
Photo by Shane Global Language Centres
The union that represents teaching assistants at Canada’s biggest school, the University of Toronto, wants the public to know about the ballooning student-instructor ratios in the tutorials and labs they teach.
CUPE 3902, which represents 4,200 teaching assistants, graduate-student instructors, lab demonstrators, invigilators and writing instructors, voted 91 per cent in favour of striking on Nov. 30. A strike is still far off—2012 at the earliest.
The union may be using tutorial and lab numbers as a bargaining chip, but that doesn’t make the figures any less surprising—or concerning.
If the union is correct, 42 per cent of labs and tutorials at U of T now have more than 50 students, more than 100 sections have more than 100 students, and the proportion of tutorials and lectures that have 20 or fewer students has dropped from 40 per cent in 2006 to 23 per cent in 2011.
Continue reading University of Toronto tutorials are too big
Kwantlen students vote to oust troubled board
Meeting marked by pepper spray, fire alarms, chants of “racism”
Photo courtesy of Matt Law for The Runner
Kwantlen University students who were meeting on campus Wednesday to oust their student leaders were temporarily interrupted after someone released a spray into the air—likely pepper spray— forcing coughing and teary students to flee.
Then, someone pulled the fire alarm.
After being let back into the building by fire officials approximately one hour later, students were just about to vote when someone pulled the fire alarm again, forcing them back outside.
But students were patient. Instead of losing quorum—250 voters—the crowd grew so large that organizers were able to spare 30 students to guard each fire alarm against troublemakers. Then, students voted nearly unanimously to remove the current board of directors and prevent them from running again. The vote signals a turning point on a campus where the student association has been the target of unusual scrutiny for months. At the end of the day, Kwantlen Student Association directors were escorted by security into their offices to collect their belongings.
Continue reading Kwantlen students vote to oust troubled board
Saskatchewan MLA is a PhD student and a mom
Jennifer Campeau balances motherhood, school and politics
Saskatoon Fairview MLA Jennifer Campeau
Running for office isn’t easy. But how many politicians can say they won their seats while parenting and working on their PhDs?
Not many. But Jennifer Campeau, the newest member the Saskatchewan Legistlature can.
Campeau, 38, is pursuing her PhD in Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Yellow Quill First Nation members’ election in Saskatoon Fairview on on Nov. 7 marked only the second time a First Nations woman was elected to the Legislative Assembly in Saskatchewan and the first time an Aboriginal Canadian woman snagged a seat for the Saskatchewan Party, which cleaned up with 49 out of 58 ridings this month.
Despite the rigours of campaigning, Campeau chose not to take any time off from her studies.
“You’ve really got to be out there knocking on doors at least 3 hours a night, if not more,” she says. Still, Campeau doesn’t take the opportunity of post-secondary education for granted. A single mother, it took her a long time to earn her first degree. It was simply too difficult to study full-time while working to support her young daughter. ”It was just the two of us so I didn’t have the support that I could have had to do well in school; I had to work to support us both,” she says.
“[But] when I was 30 and she was old enough to be in school all day, I’d had enough of telling her that education was important when I didn’t have a degree myself,” she says. Sometimes she would bring her daughter to class, explaining “it instilled in her the value of post-secondary education.”
Campeau now has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Saskatchewan.
She’s pursing her doctoral degree in Native Studies to learn more about aboriginal policy. She says the economic challenges facing Yellow Quill First Nation are part of the reason she chose her field of study.
As an MLA, Campeau hopes to provide a voice for both Aboriginal Canadians and newcomers alike. “The Saskatchewan economy and population is growing, so we have a lot of people new to Saskatchewan in Saskatoon Fairview,” she says. “I want to bring their concerns to the table.”
You’re forigiven if it all sounds tiring. ”In the last eight years, I haven’t really had a life of leisure, I’ve always been working and going to school,” jokes Campeau, “so I kind of got used to a fast pace.”
