By Dixon Tam

By day, Kate Ross is SFU’s registrar and executive director of student enrollment. By night, she’s a wife and mother to two children in their 20s – her daughter is an SFU student who graduates next year.

And for most of the last five years during virtually all of her free time Ross has also been a EdD student in the Faculty of Education.

This spring she achieved her goal in spades, receiving a Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal for completing her doctorate with a cumulative GPA of 4.13, placing her in the top five per cent of her graduating class.

“Balancing work, school and family life was the biggest challenge,” she says, “but giving up weekends and dedicating holiday time to this endeavour for 4 ½ years to achieve this goal has been worth it.

“It required discipline in all areas of my life, and in the end just dogged perseverance. And I couldn’t have done it without my husband, Laurie Phipps, who is also a doctoral student. It made it easier to be in this together.”

It was especially gratifying for Ross to complete her doctorate at the same place she works.

“I loved this university as a student and then to have the opportunity to come here and work and do both together has been an amazing experience,” she says. “As a university administrator, it makes it extra special to be recognized in this way by the academy.

Her dissertation, The Effect of Institutional Merit-Based Aid on Student Aspirations, Choice and Participation, was nominated for the George L. Geis Outstanding Dissertation Award.

SFU assistant education professor, Michelle Nilson, who nominated Ross for the medal, says: “There is no other student that I have come across in over a decade of teaching who has demonstrated fluid transition between theory and practice in a higher education scholarship.”