Career Pathways of Sociology Graduate Students
This webinar discusses the Canadian Sociological Association’s report presenting the results of an online survey conducted in Fall 2020 to capture the education and labour market experiences of Sociology MA and PhD graduates in Canada over the last ten years. The project team led by Dr. Karen Foster and PhD research assistant Alyssa Gerhardt, collected a combination of both quantitative and qualitative responses related to career aspirations, current employment, and perceptions of Sociology graduate programs and the graduate experience in preparing graduates for the labour market.
Moderator:
Dr. Qiang Fu, University of British Columbia
Dr. Qiang Fu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include place-making, health, demography, social capital, migration, machine learning, and statistics. His recent publications have appeared in American Journal of Epidemiology, American Journal of Sociology, Environment and Behavior, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, Social Science & Medicine, Sociological Methods & Research, and Urban Studies. He currently edits a themed section on big data and computational sociology (to be published by the Canadian Review of Sociology) and chairs the CSA’s subcommittee of Policy, Ethics and Professional Concerns.
Panelists:
Dr. Karen Foster, Dalhousie University
Dr. Foster is a sociologist whose research and writing spans the sociology of work, rural sociology, political economy and historical sociology. She has drawn on both qualitative and quantitative methods to study economic issues from a sociological perspective: occupational succession in rural family businesses, housing desires among rural and urban young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder, local economic development, the history of productivity as a statistic and a concept, generational divisions at work, young peoples’ experiences on social assistance, and youth outmigration from rural communities.
Alyssa Gerhardt, Dalhousie University
Alyssa Gerhardt is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Dalhousie University. She specializes in economic sociology and studies how personal debt shapes peoples’ livelihoods, how it affects their wellbeing, and how it is socially experienced in everyday life. Alyssa’s other research interests include rural sociology, political economy, and social inequality. Alyssa has works on several research projects using both qualitative and quantitative methods.