Career Workshop for SFU Geography Graduate Students

A graduate degree from SFU Geography can open up a world of employment opportunities. The knowledge, skills and practices obtained during the Human Geography, GIScience and Physical Geography graduate programs are easily transferrable to both the academic and non-academic workplace.

For the career workshop “Mapping Your Future - Geography Career Opportunities Beyond Academia” which was held on April 30^th, 2019, we invited our alumni graduated students to share their experiences about their career paths. The workshop speakers were: Simone Engels, Section Head, Crown Land Authorizations, Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural; Daniel Stevens, Director of Emergency Management, City of Vancouver; Annamarie Ruelle Sasagawa, Director, Corporate Culture and Literature Corporate Communications, Kao Corporation, Japan; Andrew Longhurst, Senior Advisor, Primary & Community Care Research Initiative, Government of British Columbia, and Olympia Koziatek, Deputy Emergency Program Coordinator, City of Victoria.

The panelist presented and discussed a variety of matters from their grad school days to the current work environment, explained their work responsibilities, reasons for pursuing a non-academic career, comparing the graduate and non-academic workplace experience, how well they were prepared for their current job, and offered valuable tips and advice to our current graduate students.

Thanks to everyone in attendance, especially the panelist and our current graduate students who are now better prepared to transition into worklife after academia. The event was sponsored by the SFU GPS SCORE funding program and organized by the Geography Graduate Studies Committee. Special thanks to Erin Rodgers and Chris Au-Yeung for ensuring that everything went smoothly.