Grad School

They say the third time's a charm, and I have to agree.

Three times I have been accepted into grad school and finally I decided to take the plunge. The first was to do a Masters in Linguistics at Ottawa U. Ottawa seemed so far away and so small town, and I wasn't sure what I would do with a graduate degree in the syntactic acrobatics of the bilingual communities of Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec. Frankly, I fancied making a bit of money after 5 years in undergrad. I went to Australia instead.

Sometime later, after having explored film and video at Ryerson, I got accepted to York to study Anthropology. Visual anthropology was what I was really interested in. I didn't fancy wading through the first year intro before getting to the juicy stuff. And besides, what was I going to do with a Masters in Anthro? Lacking foresight, I decided to get a job . . . in the film industry!

Some more time later, after having ascertained that the misogyny and hierarchy of film sets weren't to my liking (nor working outside in the middle of winter), I decided the federal government was my home. Clearly, I had no idea what the terms misogyny or hierarchy actually meant.

Who knew that a degree in Linguistics and film would lead to a job in film policy. And a home in Ottawa for almost 10 years. Since Masters degrees in linguistics and anthropology were clearly too vague for me to pin a future career on, I decided to study something I'd never heard of before - Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Okay, people have heard of innovation, but what the heck's strategic foresight?

By the end of the program, I hope to be able to answer that question.