Another absorbing story, notably packed with insightful advice based on the speakers own extensive experience, together with her many discussions with recent graduates and her three children, all of whom are graduates or undergraduates of New Zealand Universities. [Please note that all comments, etc., in square brackets are the responsibility of the Editor.]
Early Years
Prof. Houghton grew up in a single-parent family with her father raising herself and her two brothers, just a block away from her grandparents, “so I had a big extended family, and I had an aunt and uncle twins that were only eight years older than me, so they kind of served as mentors in a way.”
Based on her own experiences - and mistakes - as a young person, she wanted to pass on a few “words of wisdom” with the idea of helping others avoid those mistakes. “When I was in high school, I was more worried about the colour of my nails than school . . . ’Oh, science, that's an option, no thanks.’”
Lisa grew up in Oshawa, Ontario “a very big blue collar town”. It’s three big car manufacturing plants inspired such town mottos as ‘The City that Motovates’.
However, her grandparents and father ran a small packaging factory, and she spent a lot of time working in the factory - but her Aunt and Uncle’s stories of University life turned her thoughts in the direction of tertiary education.
When nearing the end of high school, Lisa was asked by the school Counsellor what she wanted to do with her life - which she found a bit off-putting. University, while desirable, seemed financially impossible. “I did feel like what I wanted to do was save the world.” And Lisa said as much to the Counsellor, who promptly suggested she could be a social worker.
That seemed an attractive proposition, so Lisa wrote the essay required for Polytech. entry, completed the other entry requirements, and was accepted. Then her father talked to her about the downsides - no money in it, and it’s a horrible job - “and that really made me wobble!” Whereupon Lisa withdrew - although does think that, if she could go back in time, she would have done it just to see where it led.
University
As it was, she went to University in a rural establishment outside Toronto - “a big agricultural school, with a veterinarian school, huge science, lots of arts, so a great university to explore my interests.” Having enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts course, Lisa chose “a whole bunch of different papers, Marketing, because I thought, oh, that's cool, I love design, communication, and I took an English paper, because I loved reading books, I loved writing. A Family Development course, because that resonated with me in terms of connecting with families and community. And so just a real mixed bag of things.” In Canada one takes five papers a semester for four years, “so you really jam in a lot of exploration in your degree.”
Make Your Own Decisions - and Take that Summer Paper!
Lisa then made two points:
1. For the best reasons people, especially family, will try to guide your academic direction . . . but take it with a grain of salt, because you are now adults, you are starting to collect your own experiences, you're starting to figure out who you are.
2. Take a mix of papers. “I know the health science program has its prescriptive papers but you've got that optional eighth paper next semester . . . So start to not just do what everybody else is doing in terms of ‘this is good if you're trying to get into medicine or dentistry, etc.’
Also, take a summer paper. You're not paying for it. Take a distance summer paper if you're leaving town. [More on this later under ‘Resources’] "If you're in Wellington, Christchurch or Auckland for the Summer, take a distance paper from those institutions. They're free. Take that summer paper and try to just explore some more interests across your degree.”
Lisa talked about her own first year, how Marketing had been such a let-down: “That was not for me!” - and, while she enjoyed the English paper, felt she would enjoy reading books rather than over-analysing them. She also enjoyed the Family Development course.
One day somebody gave a guest lecture and talked about nutrition. “I sat there thinking, oh, well, that kind of connects with community. It connects with family.” - For many families, food is one of the things that connects them. “I opened the student handbook and I thought, far out, there's a degree in nutrition.”
The prerequisites were high school biology and chemistry - Biology, fine, Lisa had done that, but not chemistry. So in the second semester, she enrolled in a foundations chemistry paper - and liked it. “You know, it’s all about the teacher in many ways.”
Having passed chemistry she entered the Nutrition programme in her second year. Since degrees in Canada are done over four years and nothing in her first year was relevant to her new course, Lisa was an undergraduate for five years in total. However, she was able to take several papers for interest over the next four years. These included papers in microbiology and animal science.
Then a job came up, paid for by Hospitality Services which was basically nutrition education. It was running workshops on healthy food choices in canteens and halls of residence, first as assistant nutrition co-ordinator, then in charge. Having been turned down for the paid position, she nevertheless applied to be an unpaid volunteer in that same programme, and then successfully secured the job the following year.
At this point, Prof, Houghton asked if anyone present was doing any voluntary work. Some were, and the consensus was that it was an enjoyable experience, and that one learnt new skills. Lisa then summarised volunteering as a student:
Volunteering
“It's really good fun. So the one thing about volunteering, and for me it led to the job, because I got in there and put my time in and was reliable, responsible, enthusiastic about the whole thing.” Lisa also worked over two summers in the microbiology/chemistry laboratory of a cookie factory, analysing the raw ingredients. She enjoyed the lab work, “while still loving history and art and literature”, although did not see it as a career. What it did do was give her more information about what she really wanted to do after University.
On the other hand, the Nutrition Education job she volunteered for, and eventually secured was a disappointment - she didn’t like it. However, she was aware that it increased her chances considerably of getting one of the four Community internships in Nutrition in the whole country - which she did. But later we will see what made her give that prestigious award away.
Prof. Houghton told us all three of her children had volunteered “ . . . mostly because they went through periods, as I'm sure we all do, where they were quite anxious, which led to feeling depressed about certain things, feeling lost. I then encouraged them to get off campus and volunteer, because it widens your world."
"It gives you tons of experience. It connects you with the community, even if it's just the people in the shop. Kennedy volunteered for St. Vincent de Paul. She absolutely loved it. It didn't change her life, but it changed the number of days during the week that she got off campus and went out to volunteer to sort clothes, to work with actual members of the real world, because the university is not going to be real world all the time."
1. It can improve your mental health, and two,
2. It starts to build your resume, which you really need to build quickly.
Student Debt
Prof. Houghton was very keen on the need to keep student debt under control, and swiftly building a resume could be important in that. “We have a wonderful Masters of Applied Science program in nutrition, and there’s a dietetics training masters, but you need to carefully consider whether you should do it and when you should do it. Do not add more student debt until you get some idea of what you want to do and in many cases, get out to the real world first, and the way you do that is by building your resume lickety-split. . . . You do not want to do Honours or Masters if you don't need it for the job that you might want out in the real world.”
Decision Time
With that very sought-after Community Internship in the bag, Lisa was also offered a Master’s degree by Research, working with rats, breast milk and gut microbiota which would put her back in the lab environment she had enjoyed so much.
But “how could you let go of a position that you got one of four in Canada? How could I let that go? Your ego gets involved there!” Seeking advice, her father said,”Do you want to do that?” [meaning the internship], and realising she would rather do the Masters, Lisa turned down the internship, and really enjoyed doing the Masters.
So the message to our members is: “I do want to tell you to not get caught up in the health science first year . . . explore those papers so that you can take a step back at the end of this year and say, is this really what I want to do? . . . There’s so many ways to kind of pivot around in life.”
Finding Out What Work Suits You
Connected to the Masters course was an opportunity to take an internship to become a dietitian. This was a different route to the highly competitive one discussed earlier. But Lisa did not want to be a dietitian - for one thing, she had a strong aversion to hospitals. However, there was strong pressure from the Faculty to do the programme. It was small, case-based, and carried out largely at the patient’s bedside, working out a nutritional management plan in a small group of students. It gave her contact with pharmacy students, medicine and nursing.
“It was quite innovative.” It was started in the sixties at McMaster Hospital in Canada, and the learning model has been adopted worldwide.
“I really did not like that hospital. And when they asked me what area I wanted to specialise, they had a good laugh because I wanted to specialise in the intensive care unit, which nobody wants to do. It's pretty high pressure. And they asked me why. And I was like, because my patients are unconscious. I don't have to talk to them.
. . .That was a great experience. When I finished my Master's, I was offered a very nice prestigious scholarship to do my PhD. And again, there I sat going, I don't even know what I want to do with my life.”
What Lisa did want to do at that time was earn some money and experience other aspects of life, and she took a position as a clinical research monitor with a pharmaceutical company working on preterm infants. It was at Ross Paediatrics in the US, part of Abbott Laboratories. It was quite a change. Everyone wore suits to work, and her research projects involved a lot of travel around the US and the UK.
“I got to sit bedside again in a hospital, but in a NICU, [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit] with the little babies, which I like. And so I worked for years there. I then went out to California.”
The California post was with a Biotech company working on obesity in adults. It was in California that Lisa had her first child. “I realised, oh, I actually don't like adults, and I don't like obesity. And so I realised I really like pregnancy. I like infants. I like that early life model.”
Her next post, now in her early 30’s, was in Toronto running research studies at The Hospital for Sick Children. “You know . . . let's try something different . . . I really was quite upset working with sick children. It really tore my heart apart. So I was like, okay, so I like healthy infants, pregnancy.”
So by being adventurous, trying a number of different things, Lisa was finding out the sort of work that suited her best. Indeed, a little later, she pointed out that she has never left a job because she was unhappy in it, but always to try something new.
Ph.D. - If You Need One
While working in this post with sick children the Director of Dietetics there asked her if she would write the grant application to test a Merck product, a different form of a vitamin, on pregnant women. “I love writing. I'll do that.” Yet at an earlier point in her career, when working for a Pharmaceutical Company, she had wanted to do some writing but was told she could not, as she did not have a Ph.D. At the time, Lisa felt this was OK, as she had lots of other things to learn in the job, anyway.
All this lead to Lisa enrolling for a Ph.D. at Toronto - and she knew exactly what topic she wanted it to be around, and was able to gain scholarships towards it. “I did my Ph.D. with purpose. I really knew it was healthy pregnant women. I got to follow them into infancy, these children, for five months . . . and I became a professor after that, went to a small institution in Canada, then came here, was a professor here for 15 years, moved myself up the ranks.”
Over the last 15 years Prof. Houghton’s research has been in low and middle income countries, looking at food security, agriculture, nutrition education for community, health workers, pregnant women and young children.
“I partnered myself up with a colleague who works in adult nutrition, so she is looking at chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart disease. So we really were a powerhouse . . . I really enjoy that connection to the kind of local people.”
Her first experience of this kind of work was with a Professor of hers who had been a Professor in Canada before she settled in New Zealand. “I was overseas with her, sitting in the middle of nowhere in Kenya. It could have been 1930, it was so rural. In some spots there people had no food, no water, in many cases no hope. “And I turned to her and I said, I never want to leave. Send the family over. But I want to stay here. And that was my real trigger that I did want to get back to working with communities.”
However, her old Professor was insistent that they return, and so they did. Lisa told us that, although she loves students, she now wants to spend the next 10 years or so working with communities like those in Kenya.
“I’ve got ongoing projects in Indonesia, which is near and dear to my heart. I've been there for the last decade. And for the last six years, I've been working in Kiribati [pronounced ‘Kiribass’], which is a Pacific Island country sitting on the equator, a very isolated country, with Child Fund [An international organisation helping children facing poverty]. I work with World Vision. I was director of the WHO Collaborating Center here in human nutrition in New Zealand . . .”
“So that's my story. Anybody have any questions or comments?”
Question Time
[As always, members questions were of high quality, and evoked yet more useful information. However, as this account has already almost reached 3,000 words, Question Time’ will be published later in the week].
