In my student days, the beginning of April signaled not only the approaching end of the academic year but also the moment when we all participated in a mad rush to secure some sort of summer employment. Over the years I had many such jobs, including two in the federal public service where I was able to put to good use the skills as a television camera operator which I had gained through working part-time on campus with IMS; but the best summer job, which I enjoyed for three years running, was working as a researcher for National Historic Parks and Sites. Members of the public would frequently write to recommend that an historic plaque be put up to commemorate some prominent figure from our nation’s past, and there was a committee which vetted such requests. But they needed briefing papers in order to facilitate their decisions, and my job was to research and prepare these, something akin to the role of a postulator in a canonization process, and at the approximate pace of one finished paper every two weeks. It was enormous fun, and it also meant spending most of my days in the National Library and Archives on Wellington Street, where I honed the research skills that would later serve me well as a doctoral student, albeit in a very different context. And in the process I learned a huge amount about Canadian history. My favourite project was the paper on the 19th-century Montreal poet, Émile Nelligan, which I actually managed to write en français.
Not every student is fortunate enough to find summer employment that is actually relevant to their studies, even if only indirectly, which is why some decades later I became a huge supporter of the concept of co-op programs. Co-op didn’t exist in my student days, or at least not in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences; but the job which I undertook for Parks Canada could easily have been a co-op position … and I know that there were many more like it. In the late 1980s I was part of a group at the University of Victoria which introduced a general “Arts Co-op”, aimed at B.A. students in multiple disciplines, which allowed them to put to use their research and writing skills in real jobs … and the vision was sufficiently broad that many of these were located across Canada and around the world, not simply in the area of southern Vancouver Island. Indeed, one student in that U Vic program, who came to an Arts Co-op work placement here in Ottawa, now directs the Carleton University Art Gallery! And a second is now a faculty member in our Department of History.
In more recent years I have been a passionate advocate of both co-op and practicum/internship possibilities at Carleton, and I am pleased to report that almost every FASS unit now offers one of these options to its undergraduate students. Such programs need to be expanded in the coming years, and we also need to promote them more intensely. But I took great pleasure last week in noting that a student in the recently-inaugurated English co-op program, Bryanne Mitton, was named “Co-op Student of the Year”, based on the glowing nomination from her employer. Well done, Bryanne! And may there be many more like you in the years to come.