The story of how I ended up studying at Macdonald campus starts with a fluke in the paperwork.
As an international student going into the sciences, I had to complete my U0 coursework in my first year to level up to all the Quebec students. When I got my acceptance letter from McGill, I saw that it was from Macdonald Campus and the Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry. I called them up and said, “What is this? I didn’t apply to this program.” I had applied to biochemistry, anatomy, physiology – all of the things that I thought would set me up to be pre-med.
The person I spoke to said, “Well, your standard coursework is all the same for that first year. You have to take the same eight classes regardless of where you are, so why not come to Macdonald and after that first year, you can transfer out if you want to.”
I had an incredible food science professor that first year, Ashraf Ismael. He took me under his wing and gave me a job in his lab. He told me, “I think you’re probably going to want to stay here at the end of your first year.” And he was right.
Macdonald was a place where you could have one-on-one relationships with your professors. It is a small community and it’s an incredibly diverse community.
When you’re young and you’re in college, you’re very idealistic. You want to save the world. I never really lost that, because I was always around people who were so engaged. A lot of the students in nutrition and dietetics were really interested in Indigenous health issues and equity. The people who were studying plant science and agriculture were very environmentally focused. It was very easy to be inspired by the people you were spending your days with.
I ended up graduating with a degree in food science after knowing zero about it going in. I wouldn’t have done anything differently.
A lot of my time outside of classes was spent in student government. I was on the student council at Mac and then I sat on McGill’s Board of Governors as a student representative for Macdonald Campus.
Dick Pound was the chair back then and to a tee, the governors were all so nice. They wanted to know what student life was like and they were all so interested in talking to me about my studies. At some point, they put me on the finance subcommittee, and I remember thinking, man, I am out of my depth. I had the privilege of punching above my weight. And now, years later, here I am overseeing a multibillion-dollar program at Moderna.
One of the final classes that I took at Mac was a water sanitation and health course taught by Professor Geary from the Institute of Parasitology. That really served as a kind of catalyst for broadening my horizons and seeing the path that research could take. It made me realize that medical school wasn’t the only path for doing the kind of work I wanted to do in the world. That experience led directly to doing my master’s degree in environmental health at the University of Washington, where I focused on water quality.
And then, being in Seattle in Washington, I was exposed to organizations like PATH and the Gates Foundation, and I really understood how this kind of global health philanthropy needed to partner with scientists in order to develop innovations that are supportable in the real world. And so, when I finished my masters, I started to look for jobs that would stay focused on that. I have been working in public health development, therapeutics and vaccines for neglected diseases ever since.
My advice to students is: do it all and take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, because you never know where it’s going to take you. If you have the opportunity to go to a sugar shack in northern Quebec, do it. If you have the opportunity to go visit a friend’s farm and see what agriculture in Canada done at that scale looks like, go do it. Because you never know what you’ll end up taking away from those experiences, or how they might shape the way you see the world. And you may never get another opportunity to experience things like that again.