A long goodbye

A stylized, softly blurred portrait of a woman in a white shirt, her face partially duplicated and veiled in light for an ethereal effect.

Photography by Kyla Zanardi

The last time we spoke to these members of the Class of 2020, Canada was in some of the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic – it was a time of anxiety and isolation. Now, five years later, these alumni tell us how their stories ended. For some, the story is just beginning.


The graduating class of 2020… didn't.

Graduate, that is. Well, they did, but not so you'd notice.

There were no teary farewell parties, no special awards ceremonies, no faculty formals. The grads might have been able to eventually walk across the stage at Leon’s Centre (now Slush Puppie Place) and bump elbows with the chancellor, but that would have been years later, when the Queen’s campus was no longer the essential fact of their lives, instead more of a warm memory.

Just after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, when no one was yet certain what the future held, Gillian Baker, Artsci’20, articulated a common lament of her class: “I had the best four years at Queen’s and just thought it would finish with a big hurrah. And you didn’t get that. You just trickled home; there was no cut-off or ending ... and we were left to scramble and ask, ‘OK, what now?’”

Ms. Baker, 26, was one of several 2020 grads the Alumni Review interviewed that fall for a special cover story, “The Class of 2020: Heartbreak and Hope.” Five years later, we thought it was time to catch up. As it turns out, the repeated theme among these alumni about their grad year – “It wasn’t what we imagined” – could easily apply to their lives in the five years since. And not necessarily in a bad way.

I’ve experienced lots of cool things, and I’m happy with how my life has turned out five years later.… COVID sucked, but it gave me a different opportunity that brought me to where I am now.

Gillian Baker

➔ Take Ms. Baker, who majored in global studies. “Originally, when I first graduated from Queen’s, I thought maybe I’d end up in the government, do something along the lines of international affairs and policy work.”

Ms. Baker’s career has been undoubtedly international, but not at all bureaucratic. A COVID pivot to teaching, inspired by the first job she could get after Queen’s – education co-ordinator for a tutoring service – has enriched her life dramatically, she says. “It was honestly the best stepping stone I could have had.”

After a year at Oxford Learning, Ms. Baker was accepted in the education program at the University of Ottawa, closer than Queen’s to her family’s Carleton Place, Ont., home. When she started, her course work was still all online, but eventually segued into hands-on classroom experience. Still feeling the pull of her global studies at Queen’s, Ms. Baker’s first job after the two-year teaching program was at an international school in South Korea. She taught social studies at Branksome Hall Asia, a centre associated with a Toronto private school and located on the remote volcanic island of Jeju.

  • A woman with wavy blonde hair and a white t-shirt smiles gently through green leaves, sunlight dappled across her face in a natural outdoor setting.

    Gillian Baker photographed by Patrick Doyle

“It was just a one-year contract; it was kind of like to see if I enjoy international teaching,” she says.

After Korea, she landed a dream job teaching art to Grades 9 to 12 at Notre Dame Catholic High School in her hometown. Art has long been a passion; she had toyed with taking a BFA at Queen’s before settling on global studies.

But the wider world still beckons. Her school in Carleton Place has given her a two-year leave to take another international posting, this time with a U.S.-affiliated school in Kathmandu, Nepal, beginning this summer.

“I measure my life to be quite successful,” says Ms. Baker. “I’ve experienced lots of cool things, and I’m happy with how my life has turned out five years later.… COVID sucked, but it gave me a different opportunity that brought me to where I am now.”

➔ Ellen Barss, Com’20, Comp’21, also opted to continue her education in the ominous void that followed the pandemic outbreak. She had been considering taking a second degree in computer science anyway, and “when the world shut down, it seemed like the right time to keep going.”

Her decision, she admits, might have been influenced by “a little bit of fear because things were changing so rapidly.” But it was also “not feeling that my time was done yet … at Queen’s. The chapter didn’t feel closed and what could be better … than finding a different way to close it?”

It does feel like that chapter has never fully been closed. It wasn’t really a great send-off with my peers and my program. There are still some people that I haven’t seen from March of 2020.

Ellen Barss

Launching into online courses in the summer of 2020, and fast-tracking some of her requirements, Ms. Barss was able to finish the course in less than a year and a half, choosing to return to Kingston from her home in Calgary even though classes were still all online. By the spring of 2021, she says, restrictions were beginning to ease. “Finishing off my commerce degree at home [in Calgary] was a bit sad,” she says. Back on campus, “it felt like there was a bit of community.”

She landed a job with a national accounting and consulting firm even before wrapping up her second degree. It entails “technology consulting and strategy, so it is pretty relevant to both my degrees.”

  • A woman with long blonde hair wearing a sleeveless black top stands outdoors, framed by deep red blur, with a composed, serious expression.

    Photography by John Kenney

The job brought her back to Calgary, but the COVID-induced shift to remote work meant that she was able to work with clients on both coasts and get “a lot of exposure to industry opportunities that would have [previously] required physical travel.”

This spring, looking for a new adventure, she was able to relocate within her firm to Montreal. The move was made possible by the pandemic, she says, and the broader professional experience it allowed her.

➔ Hamza Rizwan, MEng’20, now calls Windsor, Ont., home, and has forged a new life in Canada. None of that was on the 28-year-old’s radar when COVID hit five years ago.

Mr. Rizwan’s pandemic limbo was more dire than most. An international student from Dubai, he was cut off from his homeland and his family because of COVID restrictions. When his uncle in Lucknow, India, was hospitalized with the virus that spring, Mr. Rizwan could do no more than comfort his mother over the phone. Alone in Kingston after his housemates had left the city, life “was a struggle,” he admits.

His post-grad plans had been to return to Dubai, where his father is a civil engineer. He wanted to forge a career close to family. But with no idea when he might be able to go home, he decided to look for work in Canada “and see where that takes me.”

It took him to Windsor, a city he’d never heard of, and to one of the highest-profile engineering projects in the country, a $6 billion international bridge named after someone called Gordie Howe, apparently a hockey player.

  • A man with glasses and a beard, wearing a light blue button-down shirt, stands beside a stone wall, smiling slightly and looking to the side.

    Hamza Rizwan photographed by Dax Melmer

Mr. Rizwan almost didn’t take the job as a construction co-ordinator. It was early 2021 and he had only recently started working at a Toronto-based construction research lab, a position that had taken him months to find. “I thought … it’s been so uncertain and so challenging finding this [job], I don’t know if I should make the move.”

A discussion with his father convinced him that hands-on construction work might better serve his career, and he hasn’t regretted the decision. Designated an essential worker, Mr. Rizwan was soon interacting daily with people in the company office and on site, though masked and observing social distancing.

He stayed with the project until late 2023, when he was hired by a Toronto-based firm working on highway projects in southwestern Ontario. “This company has been amazing,” he says.

He finally got back to Dubai in early 2022 to visit his parents, and continued to India, where his extended family lives. “My uncle was doing fine, and I was so happy.” His family has since visited him in Canada and together they explored his new home.

“I’m so rooted in the system [here],” he says. “I can’t really think of going back [to Dubai] at this time.” Five years ago, Mr. Rizwan says, “I wouldn’t have anticipated any of this.”

➔ Before the pandemic, Harneet Kang, MIR’20, had a clear idea how her career in human resources was going to unfold: “I wanted to make a name for myself, I wanted to have my own personal professional brand,” she says. “These things were really important to me. One day, I wanted to have a manager title and a director title and just kind of climb up the [corporate] ladder.”

She’s done some climbing since graduation and an equal amount of leaping from ladder to ladder, but only after a slow start, thanks to the pandemic.

When she did land a junior-level HR job with an organization that manages health services in Hamilton, it was remote work and not exactly on a career fast-track. “I was hearing about these [tech] startups … popping off. I wanted something that was going to push me to grow in a different way.” 

I think one of the things that came out of COVID for most people is just realizing how important human connection is … After COVID, I just want to cherish every moment I have with my people and make the most of it.

Harneet Kang

After eight months, she switched to a financial technology startup in Toronto. A lot of her work was recruiting staff during the tech bubble that peaked with the pandemic. She was still working remotely but had moved to Toronto and was able to go into the office occasionally. Less than two years later, she was offered a job as a consultant with an “employer brand firm,” an agency that helps clients define and enhance their reputation as employers. Her career was progressing, but it began to feel a little hollow.

“It’s not that I didn’t like HR,” Ms. Kang says, “it’s just that I wanted something that felt like I was making a little bit more of a difference.”

  • A woman with long dark hair and gold hoop earrings wears a white t-shirt and jeans, sitting confidently against a bright, minimal background.

    Harneet Kang photographed by Kyla Zanardi

When the COVID tech bubble burst and she, like so many others, was laid off, she knew it was time for a change. Her undergrad degree had been in psychology. “I’ve always been super interested in advocating for mental health,” she says, particularly in her own South Asian community, where she knows the subject can be taboo. She is now finishing a master’s degree in counselling psychology from Yorkville University.

“I think one of the things that came out of COVID for most people is just realizing how important human connection is,” she says. “After COVID, I just want to cherish every moment I have with my people and make the most of it.”

➔ Dr. Rebecca Maciver works at a job she didn’t even know existed when she was finishing her PhD in pharmacology during that first COVID spring. But that may have less to do with the pandemic than with Dr. Maciver’s serendipitous approach to her academic pursuits.

“The way I got here was that I’d find something I enjoy and keep pursuing it,” she says. She had no fixed career path, except for ruling out academia even before the pandemic. “I was always planning on looking at industry or government [but] I wasn’t super familiar with what was available.”

She did some course development at Queen’s while looking for a permanent position, and within six months she was hired as a medical writer for a Toronto-based company providing clinical research services. She had actually applied for another job with the company and, during the interview, it was suggested she might be more interested in the medical writing position.
She agreed.

  • A woman with long blonde hair in a black top stands outdoors, framed by soft white blur in the foreground, gazing directly at the camera.

    Rebecca Maciver photographed by Chris Tanouye

Now she provides writing and editing support for the regulatory documents required in the clinical trials contracted by her firm’s clients. The work is good, but the real bonus is the working environment, she says.

At grad school, “you kind of develop this feeling where you have to be working all the time … it’s very hard to take yourself out of grad school on the weekends or in the evenings.”

During COVID, she realized she didn’t want to recreate that kind of lifestyle in her career. “I think I’m much more confident … because I’ve had to spend so much time with myself over COVID. I learned what I like, what I dislike, what I’m willing to put up with … priorities, I guess.”

Her new employer is “really amazing at promoting a good work/life balance,” she says. “I have free time to explore activities that are not related to work or the lab. I can leave work when I leave work.”

➔ Chauntae De Gannes, Artsci’20, enjoys a career that panned out pretty much as she had hoped, though not necessarily in the way she had expected. What saved her from the COVID doldrums, she says, was starting at the University of Ottawa law school five months after the lockdown.

“I didn’t have the same [sense of] limbo because I was starting a new chapter anyway. Starting law school kind of trumps the pandemic.”

  • A woman in a light blue blazer and white top stands behind glass, her expression calm and confident, with soft reflections surrounding her.

    Chautae De Gannes photographed by Chris Tanouye

COVID-era law school, of course, was not what she had imagined it to be when she first applied. The experience was entirely virtual until the second half of her second year, by which time she had moved to Ottawa from her family home in Ajax, Ont. For her, there would be no first-year moot court (mock appellate case), no drinks with new classmates at the end of the day. “I think that in-person element was something very much missed out on,” she says, “really maximizing that opportunity to meet lots of people who would cross paths in my career.”

There was good news at the end of first year – a rare student position at a big law firm – that again buoyed her spirits. She knew then, she says, “everything is going to work out.”

She articled at the same Toronto corporate law firm after graduation and now works there full time, practising corporate and regulatory law, including communications law. It’s an interest rooted in the sociology of technology courses she had taken at Queen’s. Her Queen’s diploma, she notes, is proudly hung on her office wall.

➔ Queen’s, it seems, still looms large in the minds of many of the graduating class of 2020. This fall marks the five-year homecoming for the class. Jessie Mercer, Student and Young Alumni Officer with the Queen’s Office of Advancement, notices a keener interest in the fifth-year anniversary than has been typical in the past. Particularly, she says, the alumni are interested in events that allow them to casually mingle with other members of the class of 2020.

Ellen Barss would understand that need to reconnect. 

“It does feel like that chapter has never fully been closed. It wasn’t really a great send-off with my peers and my program. There are still some people that I haven’t seen from March of 2020.”

Gillian Baker no longer dwells on what she missed in her COVID-stunted grad year, but some regret lingers, she says: “I enjoyed my four years at Queen’s so much and it felt like I didn’t get to celebrate that.”

She does keep in touch, however, and for good reason: “Still the finest friendships that I have, I made there at Queen’s.”

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