Ian Cameron:  

Life After graduation in 1979, though accepted at a couple of universities, I knew it was time to get away from school for a while, and to try to get out in the world, away from what I had known until then. The answer that presented itself to me was the military. From 1980-84, I served as an infantryman in the US Marines, with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii (sure, it was paradise, except when they had us crawling in the mud up in the hills and sleeping in rainy foxholes with strange things bothering us in the night; which was only most of the time). Part of life with 3rd Marines at that time was rotational deployment, meaning roughly one third to one half of our time as a unit was spent aboard ship, as part of the Marine Expeditionary Force (3 MAF), patrolling the western Pacific and Indian Oceans. This provided the invaluable opportunity to visit multiple countries, experience a variety of foreign cultures and customs (read: bars), crawl in the mud in their hills, and sleep in rainy foxholes with bigger and even stranger things bothering us in the night. After my stint in the military and some 3 years without having been home, it seemed like time to come back and go to school again - this time with the objective of perhaps learning something. Choosing universities sight unseen from Hawaii, I selected the University of Toronto’s Erindale Campus in Mississauga, and completed my first year, transferring for my second year to Queen’s in Kingston, to be a bit closer to home. After completing a BA in political studies at Queen’s with a concentration on international relations and strategic studies (I had been in the military after all), I continued to pursue an interest in international affairs with a Masters degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. Graduating finally in 1991, I w...Expand for more