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Regardless of where you’re from or where your school is located, starting post-secondary education is a big step and you’re not always sure where you will end up. Sometimes things don’t work out as they plan and we switch majors one or more times between September of first year and graduation. Alternatively, others decide to pursue a different career path after they graduate.
Jeffrey Baker, an alumnus of McMaster University with a bachelor of science in biology, is now attending the University of British Columbia’s diploma in accounting program. Jeff was born and raised in Calgary and moved to Hamilton to attend Mac, but after four years there, he moved further west to Vancouver to attend UBC.
Q. What made you decide to attend school in Ontario when you were originally from Alberta?
A. I wanted to live away from home and experience residence and university life, which I didn’t think one could do living at home. My sister was attending Laurier at the time, so I was away from family yet within easy driving distance if I ever did get homesick. McMaster also felt like it was going to be the right fit for what I was looking for, it’s that hard-to-explain feeling, but I just felt like I would succeed there.
Q. Did you face any challenges that made living far from home really difficult?
A. The biggest challenge was being away from all my high school friends. It is difficult to maintain those relationships, but I quickly developed new ones with people living in my residence. I only visited home three times during the school year (Thanksgiving, Christmas and Reading Week), so I had few opportunities to meet up with them when I was home, especially when balancing family gatherings with homework, it got quite hard to make time.
Q. Why did you start on the path to completing a biology degree?
A. I originally had aspirations of going into med school and biology has always been the common path for people going down that road.
Q. When did you realize that you were no longer interested in a career in biology?
A. Midway through third year I found I was not interested in biology to the degree that I would want to do it for the rest of my life. I have always enjoyed biology, but I was no longer able to see my future in it. Around the same time, I was becoming very interested in the stock markets and trading (it may have just been the thrill of making some money).
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That’s def. an interesting switch, from biology to business. I have many friends in science that take a few economics/business courses and realize that they’re veyr interested in it, but the problem is catching up on the requirements to grab a minor in business, which I find for people outside of business/economics, is pretty hard to get. It’s great that he still likes biology — he could even use that to his advantage and end up working for a science/biology based company as an accountant.
Also, I’m 90% sure we had tutorial together last year!
It’s actually not as uncommon as you would think. I know two people who finished Bio degrees at Mac and then went on to do MBAs (also at Mac).
I obviously can’t say how representative of the population that is, but it has to be a bit significant considering I don’t know thousands of people.