91��ɫ

The Highlights of the Last Decade section of the website captures the changes that have occurred at the faculty since it celebrated 50 years of graduate education, while the FGS Gallery takes visitors to the FGS Flickr account and the pictures from different events staff from FGS has been involved in, in recent years.

The Faculty of Graduate Studies was established in 1963 and opened its doors to 91��ɫ’s first graduate cohort of just 11 students the following year,. 91��ɫ was the first university in Canada to offer a PhD degree in women’s studies and the first to accept doctoral dissertations written in an Indigenous language.

Speaking about his particular journey, Baños said one of the aspects he always likes to share with people is the interdisciplinary nature of his journey. “I was a nightmare for a lot of the admin staff here at 91��ɫ,” he said. As an international student, he went from Dean’s office to Dean’s office, trying to explore how he could tackle his research and also looking for funding. He did his Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and his doctorate in Communication and Culture.

If there was any advice he could give someone currently where he was in grad school, Baños said, “You’re going to encounter a lot of issues that are not easy to resolve. I saw a lot of my peers complaining about finances, their supervisor, the program,” he said. “You need to find yourself and find a pathway forward.” He said he found a support group with some of his peers by creating writing groups. “We created these writing groups and we were accountable to each other,” he said. “It was a way to move forward just building that accountability system.”

It was while doing a Master’s degree in Business Administration at Schulich School of Business that Gupta discovered a social enterprise. “You can create a profitable business and do good in this world,” she said, adding, beginning in January 2025 she will also be teaching social entrepreneurship at Schulich. She built an award-winning, values-driven food brand, Good Food for Good, from the ground up, which is now available in stores across Canada and the United States. She also mentors new businesses in Canada and the US about how to scale sustainably. Gupta said she would tell current students, “I know it’s difficult, but there’s a lot we can learn in grad school to get us to the next phase of our life.”

James pointed out she had graduated with her Master’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies a couple of weeks previously. She praised her program administration for being “so accommodating of me doing multiple things at once, having the opportunity to explore different possibilities.” She added, “I discovered I didn’t have to be a professor to be a serious film person. I was able to create community and filmmaking and story-telling.” Her Master’s degree research was focused on aesthetics exploring the spatiality, temporality and spirituality in contemporary cinema. As guidance to current students, James said “be open to the possibilities around you, be open to not only giving help, but receiving it too.”

Looking forward to the next 60 years of graduate education at 91��ɫ, Dean MacLachlan said, we face multiple challenges and possibilities, from an unstable world order that must confront problems of climate change, forced migration, violence and dispossession, to scholarly questions such as the need to decolonize how we conceive of intellectual property, acknowledging the rights of Indigenous communities to data sovereignty, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in graduate research and pedagogy. “We are adapting to these,” the dean said, “even as we rise to meet the needs of a changing graduate student population whose devotion to research and professional development is matched by other commitments: to their families, their communities, the world we all share and the problems we all face.”