At OCAD University, I work in a student services department that specializes in student success as graduates transition out of school.
I did my bachelor degree in photography at OCAD, graduating in 2006. While still in school, I got a job as shop manager at artist-run centre Art Metropole, where I worked for seven years. I then decided to return to school to do my graduate degree. I realized that I’d reached a ceiling of professional development in my position, so I enrolled in a joint master of fine arts and MBA at York University‘s Schulich School of Business.
I wanted to gain further experience so I could come back to the cultural sector and make a contribution to artist-run organizations and arts organizations more broadly. I felt that my background as a practising artist combined with increased business skills would position me to better serve organizations as an administrator or volunteer board member. As I was finishing up my MBA in arts administration at York, I got interested in fundraising and development. I knew the arts and education sectors had many similarities in terms of how fundraising and development offices operate, so I had a meeting with a contact here at OCAD to ask him about his experience working in arts universities. It turned out there was an opportunity available.
It wasn’t a position I was looking for, but I soon realized it would help me achieve my goal in a way I hadn’t previously thought of: by helping young, emerging artists achieve success early in their careers. That was something I really missed when I did my undergrad. My goal was to shorten that gap between graduation and greater successes – shave down those days or hours of anxiety and heartache.
My week-to-week schedule is quite nice: my time is equally distributed between supporting teachers in the classroom and delivering workshops and modules centred on professional documents, portfolios, CVs, resumés, interview skills – helping students understand the various paths their creative careers might follow.
I’m also working with a team in the office to create programs that help students access internships, studio space and exhibitions. I work one-on-one giving students advice and with partners from the not-for-profit sector, private sector and business owners who want to connect the school with paid opportunities.
At Schulich, aside from the practical things like accounting and financing, I learned in a broader sense how to work with different stakeholder groups and understand their motivations. Because I’m reliant on all different groups – students, faculty, administration, private businesses – I need to understand where they’re coming from to do my job. So I learned awareness and empathy. The complexity of that and problem-solving were very much emphasized in business school.
The master of fine art degree and the MBA were more like an administrative structure at the school, but they didn’t have much overlap. Just on a personal level, doing the fine arts degree was a great release and a kind of therapy that helped me get through the hard days and hours of the business program. It was nice to get into the studio and reflect upon the challenges and issues I was dealing with at the business school.
I did a minor in not-for-profit management, which gave me a greater sense of the cultural sector’s priorities and administrative challenges and a broader understanding of the arts sector as a subset of the greater not-for-profit sector. I’d never perceived the cultural sector as being part of a larger group. I still feel there’s a lot the cultural sector can learn from the greater not-for-profit sector. What I’ve been trying to do is see what can be adapted and modified to be a great fit for the cultural sector – bringing things that have been successful in terms of fundraising or organizational management to the arts.
