When Fuyan Liang turns 82, Alexis Lu will take extra joy in the occasion. Liang’s family has two reasons to celebrate this spring. Six months ago, the octogenarian was fighting for her life. Lu, her eldest grandson, was struggling to keep up with the MA in Economics program in Toronto while staying by her side in China. While Liang’s medical team did their job, an informal team of Department of Economics members assembled to ensure Lu could both do his academic work and stay with his grandmother.
“During the winter break, I heard from my family that my grandma was having very serious emergency medical issues,” Lu explained. “She had several surgeries during that period. I couldn’t leave the country to get back to U of T for fear it was my last chance to be with my grandma.”
After spending two weeks at his grandmother’s bedside, she had a very successful surgery and Lu felt he could return to UofT. The unexpected journey home for winter break, however, was not over.
“I was trying to get back to Canada when I realized my student visa had expired!” Lu remembered. “It was bad enough that there had just been a family medical emergency, but then there were terrible issues with the visa and the only thing you can do is wait for IRCC to issue a new one.”
Lu didn’t get back to Toronto until February. Missing that first month of the second semester was intense. The course work for the Master’s in Economics program is compressed into just eight months of study.
While the clock was ticking on the program, the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) was able to intervene and provide Lu with the letter IRCC required to prove he was a current student who needed to return to Canada to complete his studies.
While SGS helped with the bureaucracy, members of the Department of Economics got to work to support Lu.
“I got nothing but support from my TAs and my professors,” Lu said, “especially Professor [Courtney] Ward, because she helped me both academically and emotionally. It feels strange to say that, because I hadn’t really met Professor Ward before our first interaction online!”
Ward used the tools available to professors to support students experiencing life difficulties. She gave Lu an extension on the due date for his coursework and selected a PhD peer mentor to guide him through the research paper course.
That mentor was Anthony McCanny, who has already made significant contributions to research on levels of happiness.
“I was lucky enough to have been Alexis’ TA in ECO1400 (MA Econometrics) last semester, so we’d already had some time to get to know each other,” McCanny remembered. “If there was any secret to letting students know I was approachable, I think it was just repeating that I was always happy to discuss not just class matters, but also to talk about the MA and PhD experience. I got lucky in this instance because I am also acting as the co-President of the Graduate Economics Union this year, so it’s part of my role to look out for the MA students and do what I can to improve the experience.”
That commitment to the MA student experience showed in the flexible methods for meeting to discuss research methods, data gathering and other issues that can require guidance from more experienced researchers.
“Usually, for the research paper course, students need to have in person discussions with their mentors, but they agreed we could hold online meetings every week because I was in a special situation,” Lu said.
The flexibility Ward and McCanny enabled helped Lu focus on doing everything he could to stay engaged with his studies from an opposite time zone.
“I reviewed the lecture materials because Professor Ward posts the slides ahead of class,” Lu said. “That gave me time to see the structure of the lecture and what topics would be covered, and then I’d do some literature review before meeting with my mentor.”
Lu was also able to keep up with another course using online learning. Professor Michelle Alexopoulos frequently uses hybrid methods (a mix of online and in person) to teach Macroeconomic Theory.
“If the class had been in person only, I wouldn’t have been able to attend,” Lu said. “I tried to maximize my online attendance every chance I could.”
There were no online learning opportunities for Empirical Methods in Industrial Organization, but Lu found support there too.
“One of my classmates, Qikai Zong, provided me with the lecture notes because he attended every week,” Lu remembered. “I don’t think he missed a single lecture, he even told me that because I needed the notes, it motivated him to attend.”
Zong, who shared three courses with Lu, highlighted points that were mentioned in class that he felt weren’t reflected in the lecture materials their professors shared. He also told Lu about any extra advice, or cautions, about up-coming assignments the professors mentioned.
“I think this kind of support comes naturally in the MA program because the community is very close-knit, and students are always willing to help each other stay on track, especially when someone is going through a difficult time,” Zong said.
With the additional support, Lu found he could do his work, even if conditions were bad. He was successful in his determination. In March, he received an offer from the University of Western Ontario and will be start his PhD in Business Administration at that institution’s Ivey School of Business in September.
“Alexis’s work is a testament not just to his own determination, but to what becomes possible when a student is well supported,” said Professor Courtney Ward. “ECO1060, the Research Emphasis course for PhD-streaming MAs, is designed to be rigorous, but Alexis did the hard work and was able to navigate a difficult period and produce work of which he can be proud.”
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