This is a guest post by Bernard Picard-Friesen, a Program Advisor, Strategy and Engagement Division for the Fish and Fish Habitat Protection Program (FFHPP) for Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Bernard is now part of the co-op hiring team for FFHPP – watch the job board for opportunities to work with him.
The first co-op interview
It was 2 AM in Pokhara, Nepal and I was still recovering from food poisoning acquired during an ill-advised street meat indulgence. My $6 US per night hotel had an inconsistent electrical connection and I suspect the modem was a potato with some wires and antennae attached. My body was sweaty and shaking – was I just nervous, or was this the feeling of E. coli churning in my tainted gut?
None of this mattered though; I was about to do my first co-op interview. I dialed the 10-digit number provided on the interview invitation and shuffled through my notes while the call connected. It was showtime.
The interview for the BC Parks Student Ranger position went as smoothly as I could have hoped. My electric power never wavered and my 3 interviewers were impressed by my willingness to make the call, despite the planet and 12 time zones situated between us. It didn’t really feel like a choice, though.
Since I began my undergrad I heard the same story from everyone: “If you don’t do co-op you won’t get a job.” I took this advice to heart, but had also seen the evidence of this phenomenon first hand. Some friends went to grad school if they couldn’t find work after their undergrad, while others kept working at the local climbing gym.
Since I was returning to school as a “mature student” and had already missed my chance to establish a career during my early 20’s, I really felt the pressure was on.
The job offer
I had only just returned home to Victoria when I got the call saying I got the gig. Relief washed over me while my new supervisor explained our first assignment: a week at a kid’s Christian summer camp in the interior for Student Ranger training. It was time to repack my bag and start another kind of adventure: instead of trekking through the foothills of the Himalaya I would be navigating the bureaucracy of the BC government …
Over the next 2 years, my self-assessment of my co-op experience shifted from “fumbling around in the dark” to “I might be getting the hang of this.” Each semester I applied for every job that looked tolerable and that I had any qualification for. Each semester I showed up to interviews with little preparation and hoped that my charm and improv skills would carry me through. Surprisingly, this approach had its downsides; I was advised that quality rather than quantity was the key to success with job applications.
So I changed my strategy and began to really customize my cover letter and resume for each position. I also decided to focus entirely on government work rather than private sector opportunities. This was because I had an ace up my sleeve: my recently declared minor in Public Administration.
Gaining focus
The Public Admin thing was the result of another piece of advice I had received. I was speaking with an older friend of mine who had a well-established career and had bounced back and forth between public and private sector work opportunistically for decades. I was telling her about my university experience so far and my continued doubts about the outcome. I lamented that I had recently been noticing some classmates of mine were doing directed studies and getting lab experience which was setting them up for very technical co-op positions during the summer.
“Is that what you want for yourself?” She asked.
“Well maybe,” I mumbled, “I think I would enjoy lab work for a summer but I don’t imagine myself actually working as a scientist. I would probably be more successful in a role that focuses on what is being done with science. Perhaps public policy?”
“Then don’t compete with the folks focused on lab work,” she raised an eyebrow. “Do something that sets you apart and makes you uniquely prepared for the work you imagine yourself doing.”
So I did. And fortunately, UVic offered public administration as fully-online classes without any lectures or exams. You just did the reading and wrote your papers and that was it. Super easy to integrate into a 4-course plus 20-hours a week part time job schedule. This was pre-pandemic so the idea of taking a class remotely still had some modicum of novel charm. The classes themselves were not quite to my taste. If government structure and policy is boring then the academic analysis of government structure and policy is catastrophically boring. But this was all part of the plan, so I did the readings and wrote the papers and by the time I found myself standing in a suit and tie at the lobby of the fancy new BC Ministry of Agriculture building, I knew I could explain (using sophisticated jargon) how my education and experience would benefit the program I applied for.
A silver lining
Little did I know that I wouldn’t step foot in that building again until I was handing in my government laptop and headset in late August. This was because the whole world went into lockdown that spring and my co-op position with AGRI took place in my bedroom. Best-laid plans, they say. Some setbacks can be viewed as opportunities, however, and for me at least the pandemic held a silver lining. Since many students chose not to enroll in fall 2020 courses due to the virtual mandate, I was betting that I had better-than-normal odds of getting those competitive co-op jobs.
The dream job
This gamble paid dividends when, while cruising the UVic co-op job portal for new listings, I saw a posting for a gig with DFO. The holy grail: a federal government organization with a budget for scientific research and teams dedicated to taking the results of that research into the field to implement them. I had a biochem midterm coming up, but prep for that was fading into memory as I immediately began my application. I scoured my job history for relevant experience and whispered a thank-you under my breath to my co-op coordinator who had recently suggested improvements to my resume. I paused for a moment before clicking “submit application.” Was it good enough? Should I go back and expand on my admittedly meagre “public engagement experience?” No. I couldn’t know if my application was good enough but I had nothing left to do but to trust my plan and take the plunge.
I haven’t applied for a job since because I’m still doing that job today. It isn’t a co-op anymore – I’m on a 2-year contract with DFO and I’ve moved to Nanaimo to work at the Pacific Biological Station now that I’m done my undergrad. My work is quite varied and I get to be involved in policy engagement, app design, performance management, staff training tracking, and (get this) co-op interviews and hiring processes. My team is full of fun and caring people and I’m given a surprising amount of autonomy in how I want to run my projects.
Looking back at my co-op journey, it’s hard to calculate what specific choices or events enabled this outcome. I think more than any individual action it was my persistence and faith in my plan that made it happen. And luck. After all, what if my power had gone out in that $6 per night hotel in Pokhara?