Jennifer Baechler still remembers how jittery she felt being dropped off at Shirreff Hall by her parents on her first day at Dal in the fall of 1996. “I remember being incredibly nervous,” she says. “Nervous about leaving home and fitting in to this new place.”
She didn’t know it at the time, but the roommate she had been randomly assigned that day would eventually become her best friend. And now, 20 years later, the two of them are graduating with their Dalhousie doctoral degrees on the exact same day.
“Dal has enriched my life in a lot of ways and that friendship is at the top of the list,” says Jennifer, who will receive her Interdisciplinary PhD this Wednesday. Her friend, Nicolle Vincent, is graduating with a PhD in Clinical Psychology.
While Jennifer studied marine biology as an undergrad at Dal, she also developed an interest in global conflict and state building in her European history classes — topics that have informed her academic journey ever since. She went on do a master’s in Peace and Conflict Studies at a small university in Austria, gaining an appreciation for disciplines that blend and integrate knowledge and different perspectives, which made her perfect for Dal’s Interdisciplinary PhD program.
She started her program in 2006, eventually leading to a thesis on collaboration between government departments working in conflict zones. But alongside that, she also started working at the university. She did so first as coordinator of Management Without Borders (MWB), a course that engages students from all the different Faculty of Management graduate programs in collaborative group projects hosted by public, private and not-for-profit organizations across Nova Scotia. Today, she’s associate director of the Corporate Residency MBA program and a lecturer in the Faculty of Management.
Jennifer says there’s been a great degree of cross-pollination between her highly collaborative day jobs and the themes she’s explored in her academic work.
“The similarities between that form of collaboration in MWB — where you have students seeing the world and problems really differently — and the kind of collaboration that I studied were remarkably similar,” she says. “What I learned through being part of the MWB curriculum development and delivery definitely enhanced my PhD research.”
Building a career as an interdisciplinary scholar can be a challenge, but Jennifer says Dal has been a great place to do so.
“There are just so many things at Dal that cherish interdisciplinary approaches,” she says. “There’s a lot of mentors in my life and they never come from one discipline. That implicit learning at Dal has been tremendous.”
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