More Lethbridge College instructors are completing their PhDs, seasoning their teaching with the knowledge gained. But the journey requires sacrifice from those around them.
Leigh Kowalchuk and Ron Solinski will soon be pondering long-awaited vacations. For five-year-old Leigh, world travel is a definite possibility, while Solinski, an instructor in Lethbridge College’s Child and Youth Care program, will likely head to the family cabin near Kootenay Lake, B.C.
For Solinski, the return to the cabin is a return to a “previous life,” one free of the toil of chasing his doctorate in child and youth care.
“It was built as a place of enjoyment,” says Solinski, who finished his doctoral work in August 2010. “But after working on my PhD there for so many summers, it became a place of immensely difficult work.”
Young Ms. Kowalchuk knows nothing of what it takes to earn a PhD, but she knows her daddy, Terry Kowalchuk, head of Lethbridge College’s School of Environmental Sciences, put a lot of effort into his, starting two years before she was born.
“She understands when daddy’s working, he’s working,” says Kowalchuk, who expects to finish his PhD this year. “I would have loved vacations the last seven summers, but we plan to have one when I finish. Wherever they want to go on this planet, that’s where we’re going.”
The “they” would include Kowalchuck’s wife Kim, who, Terry agrees, was with him every step of the way as he tracked fur and fowl over the prairies in pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan in how animals respond to human encroachment on their habitat.
“It was a team effort,” he says. “I consider this as much her accomplishment as it is mine.”
If you’re getting the idea doctorates require work and commitment on behalf of the candidate, and a large slice of family support, you’ve about got it. Solinski’s children Zain, 14, and Nadia, 9, and their mother Randi Malmo, understood his quest was not going to be a nine-to-five weekday proposition.
“I put in seven days a week,” says Solinski, who is “extremely grateful” to Lethbridge College for granting him a one-year sabbatical in 2006 during his 4½-year quest under the auspices of the University of Victoria. “It was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done academically. It was like a master’s degree cubed.”
While he devoted all his summers to his work, and a lot of nights and weekends during the school year (he’s been at Lethbridge College 20 years), the financial cost was as difficult.
“I didn’t do it for the money. I’m intrigued by what I teach and by mental-health treatment practices. I think earning the doctorate has made me a better instructor; I can teach to a much greater depth.”
For Kowalchuk, who, like Solinski, hails from small-town Manitoba, May through July for four summers meant hunkering down on the prairie landscape observing pintails, an activity that led many on campus to believe his PhD was in “counting ducks.” With grants of some $400,000 from outside agencies and a lot of gifts-in-kind support from the college, Kowalchuk was able to track pintails to determine how they respond when human activity encroaches on their habitat.
