Lorna MacEachern is the Associate Director of Student Engagement at Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS). She sat down with GradLife McGill to share her career path from MA student at McGill, working with Postdocs at Yale, and her return to McGill. Lorna is passionate about helping graduate students discover their career paths and has been instumental in the development of MyPath.

GradLife McGill is about sharing the graduate student experience by engaging and connecting with other graduate students and fostering a community. Can you share with me your experience and memories you can recall from your time at McGill as a MA student?

I remember the summer leading up to starting the program. I was full of excitement, full of trepidation. I didn’t know what to expect and I couldn’t believe that I had been accepted. It was a bit of a dream come for me in many ways. During that first semester, I had strong imposter feelings. I kept waiting for GPS to send me a letter saying, “you’ve been accepted by mistake”. I remember thinking that everyone around me was so smart and so capable – and how did I get here?

At the same time, everyone around me was so amazing and interested in the same things I was interested in. It was the first time in my life that I really felt like I was with my people. I was with the people who really cared about the same things that I cared about and wanted to spend hours and hours talking about them.

The workload was intense, like, really intense. I have never worked so hard in my life. I would say it was anxiety provoking and difficult, but it was also really, really rewarding. I look back on that time with a lot of fondness. I feel like I grew enormously as a human being during that time. I was challenged in ways that I didn’t expect to be challenged. I was stressed in ways that I didn’t expect to be stressed. Luckily, I think, with time my memory has sort of faded and the most distressing and difficult parts of it are in the past.

It truly was a transformative experience and opened up a whole new career path for me. It opened my mind to ideas and experiences; I could not have had anywhere else.

What do you think are the challenges facing McGill graduate students in 2023? You started working as a career counselor in 2006, do you think they’ve changed over time?

After I finished my Master’s, I miraculously got my dream job working at the career planning service at McGill (CaPS). When I first started working as a career counselor, about 15 years ago, the topic of career outcomes for graduate students and PhD’s in particular, was not a popular topic at all with anybody other than the PhD students themselves. Departments didn’t want to hear about it. Faculty didn’t want to hear about it. They really wanted to remain, believing that most of their students were landing in academia. The data and outcomes were a lot less visible on that then. I remember, our tagline for graduate career planning was “it was safe space to talk about non-academic careers here”. Because no one was talking about that.

Back then, CaPS was one of the few services that had dedicated resources, people and programming specifically for graduate students. Now we have Skillsets, Graphos, and the Wellness advisors. There are much more specialized services for graduate students now, which is fantastic.

One of the things I really love about working at GPS (Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies) is that Josephine (Josephine Nalbantoglu, Associate Provost of Graduate Education & Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies) is very dedicated to helping graduate students succeeded.  She has implemented some great projects and initiatives. For example the TRaCE project,  which looks at graduate school experiences and career outcomes for students. I think from that, combined with the literature, there were themes that kind of emerged that GPS is working on and that I’m connected to.

Firstly, uncertainty about expectations, either from your program or from your supervisor. There’s sort of this feeling of “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing” and a lot of people have difficulty staying motivated. It’s a long process and you might have been really into it at the beginning, and after a few years you ask yourself: “why am I doing this again? What’s the point in this? This is hard”. We have worked on things like the Letter of Understanding or My Progress, which are both designed to clarify expectations.

Next is acquiring all the skills that you will need to be successful in the transition to something afterwards. At CaPS, I would often see people towards the end of their degree, and they have not had the time or space to really think about it earlier – how can they strategically maximize this experience by choosing, the right RA-ships, TA-ships, assistant jobs within McGill to gain the right set of experiences that will expose them to developing those skills. My advice is that a well-rounded skillset will open more doors. I often meet people who are just starting to think about this pathway and realizing they might be missing things from that skills toolkit and have to do it now, towards the end of their degree when they’re already super stressed.  The doctoral internship program can help people to gain a variety of experiences.

All that to say, a lot of things have changed. I think there’s a lot more intention – a lot more services, programs, options and even now policies in place.

What is your advice to current graduate students?

The focus of my work is around individual development plans and using them as a motivational tool, a goal setting tool. I encourage graduate students to be holistic, in their view of themselves and their graduate degree. Of course, you’re really excited about your subject area, and so you’re intrinsically motivated. Slowly over time, your reason for being here starts to morph. If you don’t sort of sit down and think about why am I still here? What do I want to get out of this degree? How do I want this experience to be transformative for me? What do I want to be able to say about my graduate experience when I graduate? You kind of get lost in the details and you kind of forget to zoom out. Nobody’s forcing you to do this, so why continue doing it? And I think many people have very good reasons that are really grounded in their values and their intentions.

My advice to graduate students is to remind yourself of why you’re here. Allow that to morph and change because who you were when you start your degree and who you are when you graduate are going to be two different things. We’re constantly changing and evolving, and so should your motivations and values.

You are not only your degree. In fact, there’s some suggestion that if you identify too closely with “I am my PhD”, that it can actually be really distressing. Because if it’s not going well, it becomes a bit of an identity crisis. You are more than your PhD. You have a life outside of the lab or outside of research commons. Maintain that life, maintain those relationships. Be clear on what your priorities are. I think it’s easy when you’re in an intensive environment like academia to be strongly influenced by the culture which encourages us to sort of treat our work as our identity.

You have options here. With balance you may find that you actually approach your work with more energy, with more engagement, with more anticipation, because it’s in context. It’s not in isolation.

You are now the associate director of student engagement at McGill, what has been your career path? Did you always know you wanted to pursue a career working with university students?

After I finished my undergraduate degree, I worked as an RA first in clinical research and then as a clinical research coordinator. I used to interview older men who were undergoing treatment and I noticed that these men were all really depressed, scoring quite high on depression inventory. When I would sit down with them and talk, they would often say how they used to be an architect or something of the sort – and how being retired made them feel like they had nothing. The loss of career identity was really having a huge impact on them. This is when I got really interested in careers.

We identify so much with our careers in Western culture. The first question we ask a stranger is: what they do? We don’t ask how many brothers and sisters do you have or where do you live or like when I was a teenager, what music did you listen to it? Now it’s what do you do? And the answer seems important, I’m going to judge your entire personality. If you’re a teacher, you must be this kind of person. Or, if you’re a banker and you must be a money of person. We make assumptions about who the human being is their identity based on the job they have. There’s a lot of pressure to choose a career that matches with your self-perception. No wonder people get really stressed about career decision making.

When I decided I wanted to go back to do a Master’s degree and pursue a career as a career counselor, I knew I wanted to work with young adults. I didn’t know I wanted to work with graduate students. That didn’t occur to me. I just knew I wanted to work with people, I knew I eventually wanted to work in a career service as a career counselor.

I was really lucky in my first job after the Master’s degree was at McGill. It was my dream job, I just didn’t think I’d land that right away. I did that for a number of years and slowly wanted to do more. One of the struggles when you work one-on-one with people is that you start to see the systemic issues and structural challenges that graduate students are facing, yet at that time, I had no control over helping them.

I felt a bit stuck and wanted an opportunity to have a bit more influence and be involved in shaping things. I got this opportunity to help start up a career service at Yale University for postdocs. That was a great experience because it allowed me to build something from the ground up. I worked in close consultation with the postdocs there to develop something that was a little more holistic. I was really trying to bring together well-being, professional development. and career planning under one-umbrella.

After a few years, I fortunate enough to be able to return to McGill and CaPS, I got the chance to bring back some of what I had been doing at Yale. I met Josephine (Nalbantoglu) not long after that, and she was really interested in individual development plans. She wanted to implement them at McGill, and I was lucky enough to be involved in that project and to work with her on developing the toolkit to implement that.

Now I get to work at GPS and make a difference at a systemic level. But I still get to do the one-on-one sometimes with students. I probably should give that up in my current role, but I can’t. I really love meeting with students and delivering the programming. So, I still do that as well, and I’m lucky that I get to both. I’m also very lucky to work with some really great people. The “My Path” team at GPS is fantastic. The graduate student assistants who work with us are amazing.

You’ve been instrumental in the development and launch of MyPath and the IDP, talk to me a little bit about both of those, what are they and why should graduate students know about them?

As I mentioned, working as a career counselor, I’d see students towards the end of their degree. My secret fantasy was how could I get them to think about this stuff in a slow and steady way throughout their degree, rather than all at once at the same time as writing their thesis, which is already a stressful time.

The individual development plan is a tool meant to help people establish their priorities and goals for the year.  It’s typically been centered on career decision making. You go through a self-reflection process and then identify potential career paths and then establish professional development goals related to that career path and implement them. However, I really wanted to encourage a more holistic approach to goal setting. I didn’t want the goal setting to be only around professional development. I wanted to encourage people to be thinking about all their goals; academic goals, professional development goals and perhaps even more personal. So, we designed My Path a little bit differently and we had this wiggle room to do that.

At this point we have quite a big toolkit, and a fairly large workbook that walks people through that process of self-reflection, identifying goals and then creating a plan for how they’ll implement them. Now, we have a shorter version of that too. Soon to be renamed – we have not yet decided what to call it. We also have an online E course, and an online app, so there’s a few different ways that students can engage with this, depending on how deep they want to go.

The other thing is that we know is that students do better when they do things in community, when they feel less isolated. And so, we’ve designed the programming to help students connect with each other and have conversations. Helping them realize how universal their experiences are, they are not outliers. It helps to break isolation, normalize and be creative. With that, we also work more closely with the departments to implement custom solutions and department specific programming for students.

Lastly, how can graduate students connect with you?

Email: lorna.maceachern@mcgill.ca

CaPS, Email: careers.caps@mcgill.ca, Website: https://www.mcgill.ca/caps/

MyPath, Website: https://www.mcgill.ca/mypath/