 What was your first job after university? Well my first job was working at a company called Public Affairs International and I worked in government relations. I didn't work in public opinion research but the company that was affiliated with it, I was a company owned by Alan Gregg called Decima Research and by the way Alan another Carleton graduate, another alumni and he brought me in to do the 1988 federal election and my career in polling started with that. I really didn't have a plan when I graduated from high school. My twin brother and I were the first in our family to go to university. I just knew that I wasn't going to stay in Cambridge, Ontario. I was nice to town as it was. I knew that there was a bigger world for me to experience and I thought that the best way to do that would be to go to university. So I started my university career at Wilfrid Laurier University where I did my BA in my MA and then I went to Carleton for my PhD. What attracted me to political science is I was always interested in politics. It seemed to be very immediate. It was a pretty vibrant time in politics back then and I originally actually started in history and I thought it was a little more contemporary in my focus and I was really more interested in what was going on at that time day to day. The reason I got into polling was because it was factual. I found when I was going to university there was a lot of people who had a lot of opinions on stuff but there wasn't a lot of people who had a lot of facts. So the thing I really liked about public opinion research was its precision and its finality. It tended to settle a lot of arguments back then really quickly. And the whole scientific method I found really appealing that you had a very specific question that you were trying to answer that you could structure a study in a certain way and you could come up with that answer by the end of it. The whole package really worked for me. Well, it didn't just help me along the way that I took a political science degree. It helps me every day. It is absolutely true that everything that I learned when I was going to Carlton and then previous to that Wilfrid Laurier that I still use it today. I mean, I work in an environment in which the statistical methods that I learned, the scientific method that I learned, what I learned about Canadian history and sociology, what I learned about everything that you can imagine about this country, not only do I apply it when I'm talking about Canada but I also bring it to the rest of the world where I use the same methods, the same ideas, the same concepts, and the same skills to explore public opinion in all those places. I think the most important lesson that I've learned so far, really the biggest one, is that you need to keep learning. Things are keep moving so fast in the world of business. They keep moving so fast in the world of social science that I think it's really easy for people to get uncomfortable with change and to sort of sit back and compare the future with what they know in the past. And I really do think that you need to continue to build on the shoulders of what you already knew before but continue to change and modify what you do based on everything that's new out there, whether it's new technology, whether it's new ideas, whether it's new people that you meet, you need to continue to be inspired by what's happening out there and what's contemporary. And it just makes you, I think, a better researcher but more importantly I think it also makes you yourself contemporary and interesting and relevant. So I would say that the thing that I really learned was keep learning. The biggest advice I would give students, and it's something that I wish somebody had told me when I was going to school, was to own it. You're not there to satisfy professors. You're not there to satisfy your peers. You're not there to get grades. I mean all of those things obviously are part of what you do but you really need to own what you're doing. You really need to accept that this is where you are going to find satisfaction in terms of your future career and you really need to feel that you are part of what's going on rather than somebody who's just participating as a student. Really own what your future is. Really own your professional positioning. Really take it seriously. I think too often what happens in university is we treat it as a basically a checklist where we go through school and we have to take these various courses to get these various grades to get to the next level. But the truth is if you're really serious about this, all of these things are just part of the process. What you're becoming as a person is ultimately what you're trying to achieve. And when you own it and you learn to satisfy your own conditions rather than the conditions of the academy or grant funders or whatever it is, else it is that you're going to be confronting in the future, the more that you're really trying to satisfy your own standards, I think the more satisfaction that you'll get out of what you're doing. So I would say own your experience when you're at Carleton. Own what you take out of there and then own the responsibility that you have for crafting your own career and being somebody who plays an important part in the world. Well, I think my colleagues and I at Ipsos are changing the world. I mean, we're living in an era in which we can, for the first time in human history, construct something that looks like world public opinion. And public opinion and the measurement of public opinion is an extremely powerful force. It creates change in the world. And sitting in the seat that I have the privilege of sitting in at Ipsos, I have the smartest people, the best technology, the most creative minds to work with in order to answer that question, you know, what does the world think? And the more that we do of that, the more that we bring the voice of the public into the conversation that some two, I would say, sometimes is far too dominated by elites, I think the better world that we have. So I'm really excited about about what I do in public opinion research. I'm really excited about what we do at Ipsos. And I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to go to Carleton University to learn a lot of the skills that I'm still using today.