Finding new challenges and building a fulfilling career with Alison Ewart - Dean of Centre for Research and Innovation
Dr. Alison Ewart is currently Dean of the Centre for Research and Innovation at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. She completed her PhD in organic chemistry from the University of British Columbia and began her career at Mitacs, holding several different leadership positions within the organization before moving to Fanshawe.
I was excited to interview someone who’s well into their career journey, and I was certainly not disappointed listening to Alison’s story, offering so much depth and highly invaluable perspectives on career development and leadership. I hope you learn as much from this interview as I did!
**This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
That's a great question. I sort of hit the organization at that right frequency where I was growing in my career at the same time that the organization was growing, and so opportunities just kept presenting themselves. That was really great because I get bored a little easily sometimes of doing the same thing once I kind of figure out how to do it. And, you know, I think had it been another organization, I wouldn't have stayed that length of time, because every time I got to that two to three year point into a job, where I'd have that feeling like, ‘okay, I know how to do this, and it's time to move on to another challenge,’ another challenge would present itself at Mitacs, and another opportunity would open up. That was super valuable to me to get to stay in the same place and evolve my career like that. At the same time, I didn't feel like I stayed in the same place in that the organization became very different, even on a year-to-year basis. Certainly, on a five year basis, it was a very different-looking organization than the one I joined. But yeah, I just really appreciated being able to constantly find new challenges.
Yeah, it really sounds like it all just happened naturally, your career progression and moving forward in the organization, but was there actually anything that you kept in mind during this? Was there anything you did specifically to grow your career?
I think the thing that I've always kept in mind is that the most important thing for me in a job was being challenged and having the opportunities to learn, and what was not important to me was that status or that title or particular level. So, I was never targeting a job because it was a title change or because I thought it would look good on a resume. When I look at my trajectory, there was a pretty flat spot in the middle where I was a director. I was just a director of different things over and over again.
And I think had I focused on title and being like, ‘well, I'm a director, I need to push up to the next level,’ I would've missed some of those really great opportunities that presented themselves that were absolutely progression. They were learning opportunities for me that had built on what I had done before, but perhaps on paper did not necessarily look like that.
So, I think the key piece is always just looking for that opportunity to do more and learn more and be constantly challenged.
Obviously, you are a Dean now at a college. Do you feel like spending time to build this lateral growth has kind of helped you move upward as well?
Yeah, I think it has. And I think, again, what looks like flatness on paper, in actuality, was not. Not all those jobs were equivalent in terms of breadth, responsibility, accountability, and visibility within the organization. They really did kind of build on themselves. And certainly, there are pieces from every single one of those roles that I take out even now and continue to use in this position.
The obvious one is leadership. I mean, that's probably the ultimate transferable skill. But the one I think I started building even back in grad school is the ability to defend ideas or decisions, and I very much had to refine this through all the positions that I had at Mitacs.
The culture was kind of university based in that you were challenged a lot on the ideas that you were putting forward, and you had to be able to defend them, otherwise, you would never be able to move in the direction that you wanted to.
And that remains the same in my current position, so I think that's one that really, over the years, I did build up and find to be quite useful now. Another one is, throughout my Mitacs positions, the size of the team that I was working with grew throughout the years that I was there, and so that gave me a lot of experience in building teams and putting together those right circumstances for people to be collaborative, to bring out their best selves, and sort of help advance what the team is trying to do. Because I had moved into various different roles, I had a lot of different teams and was in that aspect of building team culture more than once, which I found really useful when I came to Fanshawe into an established team where I hadn't grown up and I hadn’t known people for, you know, the last 13 years (like at Mitacs) and yet needed to continue building that sense of team culture within my current portfolio.
Yeah, that's a good one. I hadn't really thought about why I do that, but I remember hearing – and I'm gonna butcher it a little bit – “to those who have a lot, a lot is expected,” to paraphrase. I feel like just by virtue of growing up in Canada, by growing up with highly educated parents and having access to education, that I had a lot of advantage because of things that I did nothing to earn myself. That's just sort of a function of where I was born, basically. And I feel like with that advantage, you have to do something important, and you have to pass that on because not everybody is born into the same circumstances. And that's been something that has really resonated with me for a very long time. So, it's important to me that while I work in my professional career, that I'm actually doing something tangible for my community and where I live, and applying the skills that I have professionally to help make things better for the people around me.
The first one that comes to mind is a Mitacs project that I was involved in. One of the things that I found super enlightening when I first joined Mitacs was the experience and the breadth of research that is going on beyond STEM, beyond what we're doing in chemistry, and really kind of talking about the social sciences and humanities where I had very little experience before. I don't even think I took a social science course in university at all *laughs* and yet,
a lot of the projects I was working on with Mitacs in the social sciences with non-profits were really helping to make the world a better place. Like in a very tangible, ‘your grandmother could understand why this is impactful work,’ kind of way.
Which, you know, on the science side is not always the case, right? And so I really liked those kinds of projects, but one of the big challenges that was clear was twofold.
First, students in the social sciences had a really hard time finding organizations that would support them on an applied research project, and that was a requirement for them to participate in Mitacs programs. They had to have a company or a non-profit partner with them, and I was watching students try really hard to get organizations on board without a lot of success. And then on the other side, in the non-profit world that I was also a part of, I was seeing non-profits that could totally benefit from research, and yet weren't really able to do that - often because of money, but also sometimes just not being part of that community and not really knowing where to start and look for researchers.
So at one point, I made connections with the United Way in Ottawa. They were really recognizing that the problem in their community was around social inclusion, particularly with certain populations like senior citizens, et cetera, so they wanted to do some research on that. When we started talking about it, it became clear that this was not just a problem for that particular United Way. It was actually a problem for United Ways across the country. And so from those discussions, we built a partnership that actually spanned the country with United Ways who were all interested in supporting research in this particular area. So, that kind of hit the first piece of getting a company or an organization on board who's willing to participate.
And then the piece that we did to address the student challenge was to put a call out to the student community and say, “These are the organizations. This is what they're looking at. How would you solve this problem?” We got over a hundred applications from across the country.
So, we worked with the United Way, and we were able to make those connections, and they were able to move forward and work together and actually do some of these applied research projects on social inclusion.
Putting together that partnership and then executing on it to achieve an outcome where we had projects, real students, and real organizations who were benefiting from it - that, I'd say, has really been a highlight of my career.
I have to say carbon. You know, organic chemistry was my first chemistry love for sure, and certainly the one that I always came back to. So carbon. Carbon it is.
