Hey everyone, this is Odette here. Welcome to Queen's Citizens.
So today I just started the Irish talk about why I wanted to grab school and my experience
with it as a first person in the family to pursue masters of science in Canada.
So I am a second generation Canadian of less African descent.
And yeah, university itself is really hard and pursuing further education was not exactly what I expected.
And I just want to be very open about my experience on my own podcast.
So if you're new here, I love for you to stay. I welcome you.
And yeah, if you love this episode, give it a thumbs up and share it with a friend.
So I'm just going to get into it. Before grad school, I had a bachelor's of science and math at the University of Saskatchewan.
So if you don't know what that is, that's located in the province of Saskatchewan, and specifically in the city of Saskatoon.
So with the math and stats program there, I felt like it wasn't really good.
And I know that I'm not the only one saying this.
So I knew for sure that I didn't want to do a masters in math.
Math itself is it's a universal subject, but it's really hard itself.
I always wanted to do something health-care-related.
So that's why I did the BIOS statistics program through the School of Public Health.
So when I tell people that I didn't math degree, they're not sure how that fits in with public health.
But to pursue a BIOS statistics degree, the masters level, you can have either a math degree or a stats degree.
And even when you pursue a math degree at the bachelor's level, you can take a lot of stats courses.
So I pursued BIOS statistics, which is a collaborative program at the School of Public Health.
And yes, it was during COVID-19. So I felt like there would have been a lot of opportunities.
During my last year of studies at the undergraduate level, I just heard a lot of things about data science, data analysis.
And I thought maybe I could put my interest together, and I felt like I'll be meeting some type of demand.
So in my program, I told people it's basically like health statistics.
So when you're reading a number, let's say, 5% of patients with pancreatic cancer deal with a food security, that's just a random fact.
I always wondered, like, where those numbers come from, so you need to have some type of BIOS statistics knowledge
to be able to understand where these numbers are from.
So basically, in grad school, I also have to take an epidemiology course.
Lots of people don't know what that is. Even though we just went through a pandemic.
So epidemiology is basically the study of epidemics.
I can further explain that by saying that epidemiology, you're looking at the distribution of disease.
So for example, sometimes more females are affected by a certain disease.
They're male sometimes when you look at certain age groups. Like, okay, people who are very young tend to have this sort of disease.
So like, where I currently live, tuberculosis, what we call TB, is it's epidemic.
And it's mostly prevalent in those who are younger than compared to those who are older.
And we also talk about different risk factors in epidemiology.
So there are certain factors that make you more likely or more susceptible to certain diseases.
With tuberculosis, it is the overcrowding.
If you're with a lot of people in a household, especially if one person is infected, you can likely be infected yourself.
So we talk about housing, security or housing insecurity as a risk factor.
Moving on, during Glasgow, I also had to take this really, really challenging course called mathematical statistics and inference.
And that course was not only hard.
It's just like it was hard for me to understand how to apply what I was learning.
It was all theory.
And for my thesis, I mostly just explained into the tea about one statistical method that I employed.
So for my thesis, the writing itself was also hard because I was never born to be a writer.
I just wanted to be a writer.
But yeah, it was just a, it was also a long process. I thought I would have been done sooner.
And I also felt like certain students got priority over others.
I had two supervisors and I could tell that one of my supervisors wasn't as like invested in my thesis compared to some of his other students.
So I no longer a grad student. I don't see myself doing a PhD just because I wouldn't say that I absolutely love research.
I think that with research, it provides self-aq good learning opportunity.
However, I don't think it's for everyone.
And to work in industry, specifically in public how you don't necessarily need to have a PhD.
If you ever do want to go for a PhD though, it takes many, many years.
It could take like six years to do it.
So based on where I'm right now, I am employed.
However, even I just started, so as someone who's just entered the workforce, I think there are things that you might expect for your students.
And that's why I'm trying to get back for your shirt and put job.
You have your dream job in mind, but I'd say you still have to let climb a ladder to get there.
So with my job right now, it includes administrative tasks.
And I didn't know that's what I was basically sending up for.
So I'm hoping that I'll be able to actually do like data analysis with my job.
I actually have not done that.
I can do so many things like something like data entry.
Because right now, it's just a lot of, once again, administrative tasks.
Now I talk to a recent graduate.
One hours in my first year of masters and she was from Nigeria.
And she finished her masters in bio stats in the year 2016.
And she was working for SHA, so that's the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
And it's funny because she said that that's what happened to her.
She, during the four years of working for that organization, she mostly did administrative tasks.
She only did one bio statistics project.
Which I thought was very interesting.
So for me, I kind of felt like working for SHA wouldn't be for me.
But even though I kind of tried to avoid and this type of job, I kind of still ended up in that position,
but just with the different organization.
So this is like my honest opinion of grad school.
I want to go more into detail about my experience.
I want to tell you guys about how to get student jobs, how to communicate with professors.
Because all of these things nobody really tells you.
I also want to be able to talk about funding.
For example, for me, when I first enrolled in my program, I did not get funding right away.
And some masters programs, depending on who your supervisor is,
do you may get funding or if you do, it's still not that much.
And the same thing goes for PhD.
Like you could be paid like maybe 30k a year.
And nowadays that's just not a lot.
Students are trying to advocate for change within the departments,
but academia itself is so slow to change.
Right now for me, my focus is at high pay not my student loans.
So I also want to be very open and discuss whether it's essential to pursue a master's degree.
And then I also want to talk more about career aspirations because, well, I was in school.
I wanted to do so many things.
I still want to do a lot of things, but ideally, for some time,
I wanted to work as an epidemiologist, especially after taking that epic course.
And I wanted to work for like, organization psych WH.
Oh, I thought about working for doctors without borders.
And of course, I can go into detail about the different career opportunities within public health.
Because there's just so many, it's not just working as an epidemiologist or a researcher.
And there's so many avenues where you can work.
You don't have to work at a university, although some students do get hired by their supervisors.
I didn't.
I was able to find a job elsewhere.
And I guess that leads me with also talking about job hunting because I thought with public health,
there would be a lot of jobs.
And there are.
But the key thing is I didn't know that you had to have like three to five years of experience in order to get some your dream role.
So I think I want to talk about navigating the job market because I was very discouraged for some time.
And I also I didn't really do a lot of whole ton of interviews or not from the lack of trying.
So I want to thank you so much for stopping by to my podcast.
If you want me to discuss anything specific due to public health or even something like self improvement,
go to Google citizenship, feel free to leave your comments and suggestions and suggestions.
And I hope you tune in next time.
See ya.
This is Odette once again and I'm signing off.