Anything here is going to be about my current academic career. I’m tempted to say my real academic career, but the original version certainly played a part in the human I became as I grew up. So, we’re only going to mention that I spent four and a half years not graduating from Applied Science at Queen’s in the early 1990s. We’ll gloss over the handful computer programming courses I took in the late 1990s at what was then called Ryerson University, eventually opting out of going further along that route because I actually hated coding (which, sadly, would comeback to haunt me later), and fast forward to August 2020.
Late that month after being cautioned to patience by my wife on a number of occasions, the company I worked for figured out that our industry was going to have some major changes in the short term when it was finally allowed to open again. (I’d been sent home in late March for pandemic reasons, along with nearly all the other managers and every staff member.) Desperate to make every penny it could when it could start doing business again, it accelerated the process of combining management positions across multiple properties and packaged a bunch of us out, including me. I think out of the collection of managers in my department at two levels totalling fifteen people, they kept exactly four, and I honestly don’t know how many of them are still in the business.
Patience rewarded, it was now finally time to figure out what came next and my amazing wife reminded me of something I’d been talking about for at least fifteen years. Many phone calls and emails later, I was registered in a general science program at Queen’s University with at tentative major in Mathematics, but I had to wait for intake until the following May. A year as a student, and I’d shifted to an honours Physics degree and had the plan to follow that with an Education degree and spend my remaining professional years as a high school science and math teacher.
Along the way, I kind of fell in love with academics, and, as of this moment, I’ve had my BSc convocation (on 26 June 2025, with a truly awesome group of people) and have started into my MSc. If this second degree shows me that I enjoy research, I’ll almost certainly pursue a PhD (and this is the direction I feel like I’m headed). If somehow it shows me I don’t, we’ll look at teaching options. My wife and I have some joint dreams we’d like to pursue, too.
What you’ll eventually find branching out from this long introduction are my academic accomplishments in each academic year I’ve been registered as a student this go around. Eventually, there will some notes and progress reports on my main project, and probably an academic CV to cap things off, which I really need to start drafting at some point.
Zeroth Year
The way things shook out, I was able to start in Summer term of 2021, getting a slight jump on things. I took three courses, two of which were normally full year courses, so got fifteen credits into the degree before technically starting first year. The idea was to frontload a bit and make third and fourth year a little lighter. That technically worked, except other things eventually interfered with that. First Year Calculus, Psychology, and a Classics course in Ancient Science which was pretty cool and would bubble in the back of my head for a while.
First Year
Having an eye towards either a Math major with a Physics minor, or a Mathematical Physics specialization, my true first year looked a bit different than the folks around me, picking up the rest of the important first year science and math but adding in half of the required second year Math courses for the latter option plus the first Astrophysics course offered (and getting a waiver of the prerequisite on the strength of my first term).
Second Year
Second year saw me declare a Physics major, which was probably not surprising to anyone around me at the time, and not a Mathematical Physics specialization. My essential justification was how the pure math courses went for me. Most of the topics were “this is cool, what can I do with it?” rather than “this is cool, I love math.” I do love math, but not all of it and less for its own sake than I think I should have if I wanted the Math degree or the MathPhys specialization. And the Astrophysics course had caught me in first year to the point where I was annoyed I couldn’t get the third year course squeezed into this year.
Third Year
Beginning the “all Physics, all the time” portion of my undergraduate degree, lasting three consecutive terms, and what should have been the toughest year for content overall. Not that it was easy by any stretch. I found the first Mathematical Methods course and the second Quantum Mechanics course both extremely challenging. Math Methods was actually my lowest grade in the entire degree. Since Queen’s works on a letter grade system and our final exam results were never released, all I can say was that it was between 67 and 69. This made me unhappy, but by the end of the sequel course (which I did very well in), I understood the things I was supposed to understand at the end of the first course well enough to actually consider them useful tools.
Fourth Year
The thing that ended up making Fourth year not lighter and not more relaxed was that I got accepted into a Bridge program that had me take graduate courses and have them count for both my BSc and MSc. First term was the last of the three terms I mentioned above but contained two graduate courses so felt a lot heavier. Winter term consisted of lots of thesis work and several electives I’d been neglecting taking, Labour disputes had an alteration in the exam schedule due to a Teach Assistant and Teaching Fellow strike, but persevering through things (and I hope the Union got more of what it was asking for than not, though don’t expect to find out until Fall, at least), I finished my undergraduate requirements with a GPA of 3.87. On a 4.3 scale, this means an A- overall, but GPE scales are dumb in my opinion, and a strict weighted numerical average produces a minimum average of 85.5% across my entire degree. I say minimum as there were six courses that final exam results were never released for, so I’ve assumed a minimum grade for those based on the letter grade I received to calculate the average. The potential difference is probably only a couple of tenths of a percent, though.
A couple of weeks off and I stepped into the first summer of my MSc. No courses yet, so it’s been all about getting my research running at a graduate student level.
And convocation was on 26 June 2025, finally closing the circle.
MSc
Since the MSc program only started at the beginning of May (a day short of two months ago at this writing), there’s not a lot to report yet, but major events still to come. For now, here’s a link to the poster I presented at CASCA 2025, my first academic conference.
Life, Writing, Weirdness 