life

A Girl Least Likely, Part IV

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

DO YOU SOCIAL MEDIA? (cont’d from Part III) Don’t get me wrong. I loved what I was doing as an academic researcher, but I found myself feeling a bit disconnected from the real world. I felt isolated in that ivory tower and I didn’t always ‘fit in’. I was hungry to connect with public, with farmers in particular. I wanted a stronger connection with the people that grew our food and, of course, the consumers that ate it.

My students in a third year Research Methodology class that I was teaching at the University of Calgary dragged me kicking a screaming onto Facebook in 2007. There, and on Twitter, I found a voice. I was able to share what I knew and learned and engage in dialogue about agriculture from my unique perspective.

I was an early entrant to the social media space on this topic. At the time, I predicted that social media would radically change the conversation around food and agriculture.  And not necessarily for the better. While my colleagues in academia saw social media as a passing fad, we soon discovered that things played more or less how I expected. And throughout all this, I continued to engage online — and I even got into it with some basement-dwelling trolls.

This all landed me a bit of notoriety. I scored invites to Canola Camp in Manitoba. I got to be a farmer for a day with the Galbraith family. I participated in media interviews. I was invited to write mainstream articles for the Western Producer, Scientific American, and Genetic Literacy Project.

I co-led the organization of the very first Biotech Bootcamp at the University of Florida. There have since been 4 more in North America. I even had the opportunity to present on a panel with renowned journalist, Mark Lynas.

And this all lead me to my current role with Bayer where I get to be part of an organization doing so much to advance modern agriculture and improve lives.

This was my unexpected journey through agriculture. There was some planning, a few accidents along the way (happy and unhappy ones), a bit of serendipity, and a lot of good luck.  I was blessed with some amazing mentors and I learned from mentoring moments – both good and bad. 

Amid the grief, loss, chaos, and some very marvelous milestones, I learned a few things:

  1. We are told these days to tell our stories in agriculture. But life’s personal triumphs and tragedies cannot be disentangled from our vocation in ag. I encourage you to let your skeletons dance. Embrace your vulnerabilities and share them. Because without darkness there can be no light.
  2. Lean into discomfort: for example, engaging in new conversations with new people who may think a bit differently than you do. There are great rewards in it and, I promise you, some very pleasant surprises.
  3. Self-doubt. It’s a universal, and a very human response to some of the crap that life deals you. But don’t let self-doubt define you – allow it drive you. When that renowned plant scientist tells you that you won’t amount to anything, prove him spectacularly wrong. Don’t get one degree, get two.
  4. This sounds cliché but don’t take any moment in your life for granted. Personal stories have a way of gaining new meaning over time.  In the mid-90s, my feet were firmly planted in the middle of a story that I had no idea I was part of. That team of scientists that I served coffee to in Saskatoon was the same team that brought genetically engineered canola to the market.  That was huge event in Canada’s agriculture history. And while I didn’t get the significance of the story I was living out then, I certainly get it now.

Speaking of things coming full circle, remember that farm boy I married back in the 80s? Well, guess what, after almost two decades after our divorce, we rediscovered one another and have since remarried.

Final words of wisdom:

“For every one person that tells you you can’t do something, surround yourself with five more than tell you you can.

Enlist their help to get you there.

Then succeed spectacularly.“

A Girl Least Likely, Part I, Part II, Part III

A Girl Least Likely, Part III

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

AN UNEXPECTED LIFE (cont’d from Part II): But guess what? I had two kids to raise. And to say that they saved my life is an understatement. They breathed life back into me. They alone are what drove me to seek out a brighter path. Our little family eventually healed. Therapy helped. By 1994, I took personal inventory and basically broke up with my former self.  I took a bookkeeping course sponsored by the provincial government’s social assistance program. I also took night classes in graphic arts.

A kind uncle hired me to help out with his market garden. This was probably my first formal foray into agriculture. We would spend hours in his huge garden, preparing produce for the market in Saskatoon. That uncle also decided to diversify.  He wanted to establish a u-pick orchard on some uncultivated spaces on his farm. 

A small plant biotechnology company in Saskatoon was using tissue culture technology to clone fruit trees. This represented something new to Saskatchewan and the prairies. I guarantee you that most, if not all, Saskatoon berry orchards in western Canada were established with this kind of technology. 

I eventually got a job with this company – where I wore many hats: bookkeeping, payroll, developing marketing materials. I even got to gather and record data from our experimental growth chambers 1000 ft below the surface of the earth at a mine in Flin Flon. We also worked on cloning indigenous plant material in northern SK to reclaim areas disturbed by mining.

This job opened the door to another opportunity. I was hired by a large multinational ag company to work in the greenhouse and labs.  My job was to make coffee, autoclave agar, order lab supplies, and develop informational materials for the lab and greenhouse for tours. Innovation place was a booming canola research centre. Scientists across the public and private sectors worked collaboratively in collective spaces. It truly was a remarkable time in Canada’s agricultural history.

I loved the job. Mostly, I loved the people I worked with. The opportunities and the intellectual stimulation made me want more for me and my family.

So, every year – from 1993 to 1996 – I had applied for and was accepted to the University of Saskatchewan.

And every damn time I chickened out.

While I had grown so much; gained so much confidence. I was still paralyzed by self-doubt.

“Self-doubt is a powerful thing.

And when you are scared to do something, you can find every reason in the world not to do it.”

Family and friends did not really encourage me to “go rogue and be a single-parent-student” thing either. They probably held some of the same beliefs that I did. And, for a long time, I allowed their doubts to reinforce my own fears.

But it turns out all I needed was a nudge. And that nudge was a rather unpleasant one.

EDUCATING CAMI: One day, I was standing with a group of colleagues in the greenhouse, watering plants, and talking about opportunities. A world-renowned plant geneticist was there and he said…

“Cami, you will never amount to anything because you are a single parent.”

His words still haunt me. Those words also lit lit a fire under me.

Enter the College of Commerce, University of Saskatchewan. I was a 32-year keen-to-learn single mom amidst a bunch of business-driven 18-year olds. Yet I found brains that I never knew I had. I got scholarships and bursaries. I graduated with distinction and as one of the first graduates from the College’s Biotechnology Management major.

One of my favorite classes during my undergrad was Organizational Behavior taught by my favorite prof, Maureen Sommers. In my fourth year, Dr. Somers approached me:

Maureen: Have you thought about doing a master’s degree, Cami?

Me: Masters? Me?! [imposter syndrome] What? No way. If I do advanced studies, I won’t be finished until I’m 40 years old!

Maureen: Well, Cami, I hate to tell you this but you’re going to turn 40 anyway. Wouldn’t it be great to turn 40 with a master’s degree?

It was hard to argue with that logic. The long story short is that the master’s degree turned into a PhD. 

Between 2001 and 2007, I worked with some of the most amazing political scientists and ag economists from all over the globe. I traveled all over the world presenting at conferences. I published chapters, academic articles on intellectual property rights and plant breeding, and how networks of scientists work together to create new innovations in ag and food production.

By the time I defended my PhD in 2007, I nailed down a joint post doc fellowship with the Universities of Calgary and Saskatchewan and I was working on another book with my colleagues. The good works continued.

And my grey matter expanded…

A Girl Least Likely, Part I, Part II, Part IV

A Girl Least Likely: my unexpected journey through agriculture

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

How does a girl from small town Saskatchewan, Canada, find her way through life and end up working at the headquarters of a multinational crop science company in St Louis, Missouri?

I’d like to tell you that it was a straight path; you know – ‘as the crow flies’. I’d like to tell you that it was intentional, planned, strategic.

But it wasn’t.

This is not your typical agriculture related story. This is my story; the story of my very unlikely journey that got me to where I am today.  This story is one part navel gazing (so, yeah, I might brag a little) but it’s probably two parts heartache. I am going share some personal and surprising artefacts about my life. I will also share some learnings at the end.

I will begin with one key learning I’ve had: Life is a path. And there are only two rules: you begin, and you continue. You may not have the choice of how you begin but I’ve learned that you always have the choice about how you can continue – the paths you choose.

THE EARLY YEARS: I grew up the daughter of the Canadian prairies. A small-town girl from a farming community.

A dreamer, an idealist, a romantic.

My childhood was unstable in many ways. We were a nomadic family. My dad moved from job to job and town to town. Because of this, my grandmother became an enormously stable influence for me. Mostly because her place – near the family homestead – became a pitstop along the path of many moves.

This less-than-stable early upbringing probably led me to choose several wrong paths throughout my life (more on that later). To be sure, instability undermined my confidence. In fact, for most of the first three decades of my life I felt paralyzed by self-doubt and shame.

You see…I was that kid. The wrong one … or at least I felt that way. I was an accident – born an only child who eventually evolved into being the middle child of a blended family. I was a cliché. I was the author of “firsts” in the family: first to drop out of university, first to get pregnant out of wedlock, first to divorce, first to be a single parent…the list goes on and on.

Ironically, however, there was a wild and naïve ambition that drove me as a young adult. These ambitions were unrealistic, shaped by aesthetics, and a bit of insecure vanity. And for some reason, these things seemed wholly achievable in my mind.

This dreamer and idealist wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be famous.

And I suppose the genesis of what drove those ambitions was when I won a regional pageant in Saskatchewan and went on to compete in the Miss Teen Canada pageant in 1983.

When my mom remarried, we had settled in Nipawin, Saskatchewan when I was in grade six. It was there I’d finally found the “home”town I’d been craving all my life. I developed friendships. Lifelong ones.

I began to test the waters on who I was or at least who I thought I was. And while my hometown (Nipawin) still warms my heart, I suppose I was not much different than other 18-year-old pageant queens. I could hardly wait to get out of my hometown and move to the big city of Saskatoon.

SMALL TOWN GIRL, BIG CITY: Life was good. I started dating a nice young farm boy from Delisle, Saskatchewan soon after I arrived in Saskatoon. My experience in pageants lead me to modeling and acting. I joined a theater group and found a good agent in Saskatoon.

The next couple of years whizzed by at a rapid pace. By the time I was 19, I’d dropped out of university, strutted the runway in New York City, had won awards in a North American acting competitions, and auditioned in front of the casting agents for a well-known soap opera. My identity was wholly wrapped up in how I looked and, most certainly, not in my intellect. What I could do to contribute to society in a meaningful way was the least of my worries.

In late 1985, I auditioned for and was given the opportunity to take a lead role in a musical show for Expo 86 (Vancouver, BC). That was exciting. It seemed that all my dreams were coming true.But we all know that life is what happens when you’re making other plans. Because that same week that I got that role, I also found out I was pregnant.

I wasn’t devastated. I was willing to give up my ambitions for family stability and that elusive white picket fence. We were optimistic, that farm boy and me. We planned our shot-gun wedding and happily embraced what lay ahead.

We were incredibly broke but rich with optimism!

But our optimism was short-lived. Only a few months after the wedding, we were involved in a serious car accident…

A Girl Least Likely, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Monsanto is a strange land and I was strange in it…

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

Highlights:

  • Transitioning from the public sector researcher into a new position in the private sector is challenging – both professionally and personally.
  • Learnings:
    • being different is an asset,
    • being vulnerable can lift you up,
    • asking for help is OK, and
    • maintaining a sense of self in the face of adversity can come with great rewards.

——

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Four years ago today, I started my job as Social Sciences Lead with Monsanto.

The decision to transition from public sector researcher into a new position in the private sector was part strategy and part leap of faith for me. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I considered my options (along with other offers that came my way) and I decided to join Monsanto. My role was the first of its kind in the company; the first of its kind in the industry. The career challenges associated with that alone attracted me. But I was also keenly aware that social science and humanities disciplines serve an important role in understanding and informing society during difficult times. The agricultural industry – and food production more broadly – was struggling with a public image problem. While my publicly funded research activities had been largely devoted to understanding this complex environment and in communicating through it, I also believed that my new role would present greater opportunity to be part of meaningful solutions. The move to Monsanto was a risk – but it was a calculated one. I viewed this opportunity as a social science case study of a lifetime.

But I underestimated just how tough that transition would be.

After more than a year working for the company remotely from my home in Alberta, I jumped at the chance to move down to headquarters in St. Louis to work face-to-face with my Monsanto colleagues. I made the move in December of 2015 and my husband, Blair, joined me a couple of months later. We settled on a lovely little farm outside of Eureka, Missouri; one with a charming old farmhouse (in need of an update), a barn, and space that could accommodate our collection of critters (horses, dogs). It was all very idyllic and I was optimistic about the future.

Then everything changed.

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By mid-March of 2016, I found myself firmly wedged in a soul-sucking depression. In hindsight, I can identify several triggers for this. I left grown kids, friends, and family behind in Canada. I really misjudged how difficult that would be for me; how lonely I would find life so far from the people I loved. And don’t get me started on the daily commute. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (current population ~300K) was largest city I’ve ever lived in my life prior to this move. So, a 40-minute commute on major artery (formerly known as Route 66) intimidated the hell out of me. Let’s just say it wasn’t a great way to start and end each day in a job that I was already struggling to wrap my head around. I was in a new country, experiencing a new (corporate) culture. To say that the colour had faded from my life was an understatement. My days were grey and interspersed with a series of drab, monochromatic moments. I also noticed the subtle (and sometimes, not so subtle) way relationships changed with my old academic friends and colleagues. Where once doors were held open wide, things had now been reduced to awkward exchanges through peepholes. While I anticipated I would be met with these kinds of challenges when I made the leap to the private sector, I was not prepared for how I would feel about it when I faced them. It was like I’d been voted off the island.

monochromatic

To be clear, this bout of depression wasn’t my ‘first rodeo’. And while I was disappointed to find my feet firmly planted in another one, I was also grateful when I finally recognized it. What I’d learned from past experiences was that being open and honest about my depression didn’t make me broken, it made me human. I recognized a pattern, too. Depression seems to find me at times of mind-numbing upheaval in my life (loss of loved ones) or major life shifts (physical moves or career changes). With this latest bout, I discovered that I lacked the emotional bandwidth to manage a life change of this magnitude. I needed help. And I got it.

Let’s face it, you can’t find your way around depression, you must find your way through it. A turning point came for me later in 2016 when the farmhouse renovation was finally done. We settled into a home life that was free of disruptive construction noises; one with a fully functioning kitchen (for us, the heart of the home). I could finally ‘nest’ and establish our ‘sanctuary’. While my connection to friends and family in the home country had indeed changed, by this point we had come up with fun, new ways to connect in creative ways through daily texts and Snapchat groups. Something that also really helped me through the dark days was guidance I received from my new boss. She provided me with a compass (a map, if you will) so that I could navigate through this very puzzling space we call ‘corporate culture’.

Companies like Monsanto traditionally hire people with know-how in finance, law, communications, agronomy, plant genetics, and engineering. I was different. I was firmly entrenched in my identity and experience as a social science academic and – for a while -I didn’t feel like I was a “fit”. You know, the proverbial ‘square peg’ in a ’round hole’. I often think that the  transition would have been so much easier if there were more people like me at the company. I recognized long ago the value that people with expertise like mine can bring to a company like this; to an industry like agriculture. But it took a while for me to convey that value in a way that my Monsanto colleagues could connect with and understand.

There are huge opportunities for all manner of social science and humanities disciplines in the agricultural industry. While corporations need to better recognize these opportunities, academia also needs to get past its antipathy towards corporations. There is room for and real opportunity in corporations for people with all kinds of expertise in the social sciences and humanities: people like cultural anthropologists, behavioral scientists, social psychologists, etc.

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Monsanto is a strange land and I was strange in it. The transition from public sector research to the private sector represented a move away from my academic ‘clan’. I was wholly unprepared for how this would affect me personally and professionally. The good news is that I found my way through it. I learned the language. Yes, there’s a ‘language’ here in the corporate space.  I learned how to communicate my ideas in ways that my colleagues could understand so that I could mobilize those ideas and get things done. I realized that I could navigate and find a place in this corporate space while still maintaining my values and my identity.

We often underestimate how even the subtlest of shifts in life can impact our capacity to manage them. What I’ve discovered through all of this is that being different is an asset, being vulnerable can lift you up, asking for help is OK, and – most importantly – maintaining a sense of self in the face of adversity can come with great rewards. You just need the courage to persevere.

cami chair
I do love colour! 🙂

Resources:

The Do More Ag Foundation “helping champion the mental well being of all Canadian producers”

Free the PhD! Find the Job. Get the job. Love your life outside the lab.

Schrage, Michael (2015). “Why the future of social science is with private companies.” Harvard Business Review. Available online at: https://hbr.org/2015/09/why-the-future-of-social-science-is-with-private-companies

Paech, Gemma. “Ten Lucrative Career Options for Social Science PhDs.” The Cheeky Scientist. Available online at: https://cheekyscientist.com/lucrative-social-science-career-options/

Ryan, Cami. (2016). Why is a social scientist working at Monsanto? Blog: Cami Ryan. Available online at: https://camiryan.com/2016/10/27/why-is-a-social-scientist-working-at-monsanto/