Jane Belanger
High school students in the Hamilton area and beyond will learn about a career path in research through a new video featuring PHRI Senior Research Coordinator, Jane Belanger, in the CVD Prevention research program.
When she volunteered to help Hamilton Health Sciences work with video production company, Edge Factor, on a series promoting various careers, Jane found a great way to explain the appeal of her job at PHRI.
“I love puzzles – like sudoku and logic games – and playing quest-based video games, so I love the problem-solving part of my job. Something isn’t as we expected, or we need to do something that isn’t standard for our system?… Then my team and I need to find the root cause of the problem and work out a solution. Every day has a different question to solve; it’s exciting!”
Jane shares on camera her own journey from childhood and adolescence dreams of jobs, to where she’s happily at today in her career.
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a ballerina. I still love to dance, but in school I really enjoyed science and math, especially when the teacher would do experiments.
“I went to high school in Dundas Ontario; when I was there I thought maybe I would be a chemistry professor. My parents were teachers, and I also enjoyed helping people learn. This led me to do a bachelors in science with a concentration in chemistry.
“I found university chemistry to be a real challenge, but I was excelling in my statistics classes so I switched gears for my masters and did a masters of science with a concentration in applied statistics.
Then, while I was doing my Masters in Statistics, I volunteered in a hospital working in medical research and really enjoyed that…”
To hear her whole story, watch the video.
Thank you, Jane, for stepping up and so eloquently telling young people about an exciting, perhaps overlooked, line of employment with research.
