Marie Macauley is the manager of strategic initiatives at the Council of Ministries of Education (CMEC). She was hired there just a few months before she graduated from the CERES program in November 2016. Today, she works on public policy for education and gets to use all the skills she learned in university, from research to communication and project management.
At CMEC, Marie works with different provinces and territories to develop education programs, which can be difficult because “every province is basically its own country.” She also represents Canada as a project manager at the OCED and UNESCO.
“It’s easy to undersell yourself, especially in an interdisciplinary field like CERES,” Macauley said. But Marie applied to jobs in rounds, and to any positions that matched her skill set, such as research and policy analyst openings. She recommends utilizing the experience in graduate school as an actual job, since it is work and “you do it every day.”
“Some of the best years of my life were at CERES,” Marie said. She praises the program for being interdisciplinary, which gives students the advantage of learning multiple skills – “you’re not stuck with one specific skill set,” she said. She also liked it because of the different academic and professional components, such as the internship, and the ability to take a range of courses, from political science to literature. “It’s a choose-your-own-adventure kind of degree,” she said. During her time at CERES, Marie was able to arrange an internship independently, which led to a partnership between the institution and CERES.
Marie’s favourite part of the program was the Greece course, run by Robert Austin, which allows students to travel to the country and conduct interviews with experts there. Macauley says the experience is exciting, as students get to find sources, “get out of your comfort zone in a foreign country and be pushed to think a little differently.”
She liked CERES because it gave her the freedom to do what she wanted, although it can be hard to know what you want when you have considerable freedom, she said. Nonetheless, Macauley says CERES allows students to test out their interests, and its interdisciplinary nature lets them change career paths and fields. The research-driven and practical nature of the degree equips students with a varied skill set which is also very useful. Finally, Marie enjoyed CERES because it’s a small program, which makes it easy to make friends and creates a tight-knit community. “It was the best years because of what we were allowed to do and who we were doing it with,” she said.