When I received my admission to Trent’s M.A. in Sustainability Studies in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was beyond excited. I began to conceive of a new chapter in the life of this wandering Arab, one full of further growth, learning, and self-actualization. Little did I know back then that, two years later, I would graduate with an A+ GPA and still be unemployed seven months out. I started in January 2021 and graduated in January of this year. Since then, I have consistently been applying for jobs, researching companies and organizations, doing informational interviews, going to networking events, and taking online courses to further beef up my resume. Now several months into my search for employment, and despite being a high achiever in my program, I am nowhere near landing my first full-time job. 

In my many moments of self-reflection this summer, with Taylor Swift’s voice ringing in my head: “It's blue, the feeling I've got. It's ooh, whoa, oh. It's a cruel summer”, I asked myself: What would have made this easier on me as an international student and a newcomer to this country with many years of international experience? As a researcher, I reflected on my own journey looking for a full-time job over the past several months; what have I learned about the job market, myself, my graduate program, and my university? I then formed a hypothesis: In normal organizational structures, you have assistants, coordinators, officers, managers, and directors. In academic departments, you have a director and an administrative assistant. I am not here to suggest that each academic department require all these levels of hierarchy to function properly, far from it, but I strongly believe that creating a middle-management position of program manager in graduate studies departments could help in remediating some of the employment challenges graduate students face during their studies and in their pursuit for employment afterward. 

I created a profile for this manager—a job description, if you will—then went on to validate my hypothesis by interviewing three current graduate students in my program who have also faced labour challenges. 

Academic program directors are very busy people. First and foremost, they are tenured professors. They have their own research and teaching obligations and supervisory responsibilities for graduate students’ research at the master’s and doctoral levels. They simply do not have the capacity to deliberately and methodically establish long-term connections with companies, nonprofit organizations, think tanks, and government agencies. In a lovely, yet small town like Peterborough, these connections should extend to the Greater Toronto Area, and even Ottawa. A program manager in interdisciplinary graduate studies programs could very well be the solution to that persisting problem. Aseel Zahran, Sustainability Studies ‘24, agrees. 

“I think it’s absolutely necessary. From my experience in the Sustainability Studies program, particularly because it’s interdisciplinary, and because it brings in a lot of international students, diversifying the student body, students might not understand what kinds of jobs they might be able to do beyond the program. You need someone who can figure out how graduates in this relatively new field could fit in the job market.”

The program manager’s job would be to study each and every candidate in their program, through scheduled mandatory meetings right from the start of the student’s journey, and systematically facilitate connections and informational interviews for the student with key managers at companies or organizations that fit their interests. The program manager should be proactive and natural at networking, establishing connections, and promoting graduates to hiring managers. 

“It’s easier for a company to trust the person that represents Trent University in an official managerial capacity than to trust us as individuals. So, if we had those bridges and connections, it would be much easier for students to secure meetings and informational interviews with key people at organizations we are interested in, than to simply put the entire responsibility on us, the students,” stressed Montserrat Escobedo, Sustainability Studies ‘23. 

This program manager should manage the program colloquium and focus solely on bringing speakers who have hiring capacity, are interested in Trent graduates, and whose work fits students’ employment interests and further raise the profile of graduate students and the university overall. Minahil Niazi, Sustainability Studies ‘23, was surprised when an organization she wanted to intern with was not all that familiar with Trent. 

“When I approached the Aga Khan Foundation, an organization with offices in Toronto, for an internship and had my first interview there, they told me that they had not heard of Trent! They had only taken interns from universities such as Ottawa, McMaster, and Waterloo”....”When I applied to many organizations in Canada and did not get a response back, and I feel that’s mostly because when you are just doing it independently with no Canadian experience, without that kind of diligent, consistent facilitation and official engagement by Trent, hiring managers won’t take you as a seriously, because you are just one international student among thousands, if not tens of thousands of international students here”, she further explained.

I should emphasize here that I am not here to criticize, but to propose new thinking, and bring new ideas for how to improve upon the graduate experience at Trent, and specifically the employment prospects of Trent graduates. To criticize would mean that I could point my finger at someone or some department for the challenges I have faced. That’s not what I am here for. 

What I propose is something that does not yet exist, and I believe would add tremendous value if it did. I absolutely loved my experience at Trent and in my program. I could not be more grateful for the support I have received from my supervisor, research committee member, faculty, Careerspace, and other university functions in doing my research, applying for jobs, and going through life. 

Interdisciplinary education, in my view, is amazing. It allows for collaboration among students and faculty in different disciplines, further enriching the learning environment. I loved how my program sat at the boundaries of Business Administration, Environmental Science and environmental studies, Cultural Studies, and Indigenous Studies, and that the faculty there came from all of these respective programs. Some of us spent their entire time analyzing plants in a lab, others did statistical analysis, and many others did qualitative research; holding interviews, focus groups, and organizing community events. It’s a brilliant way to leverage the collective intellectual capital of an institution in the pursuit of academic excellence. 

However, as my search for employment and numerous informational interviews have revealed, this type of education is still unfortunately enigmatic to many senior executives and hiring managers across companies and organizations. Employers are just not sure how to interpret the skills and knowledge we gain during the program in ways that make sense to their operations. This, I argue, is at its core a challenge of communication, and I believe that my proposed program manager position would help alleviate this problem. The program manager would be speaking to organizational managers and directors as their peers, helping them to better understand Trent and its amazing students. 

By writing this article, my first in Arthur, I hope to spark a much-needed conversation about how to help graduate students attain meaningful, fulfilling employment upon their graduation. I hope that the university administration, the Dean of Graduate Studies, and department directors will deliberate on this critical issue and incorporate some of my ideas in their future academic planning.