By Stephanie Taylor

Growing up, Danielle Ivey (BSc’12) remembers packing up the family car and setting off down Highway 104 to what the young girl from Cape Breton once called the ‘the big city.’ Born and raised in the seaside town of North Sydney, N.S., Ivey had her sights set on Halifax after graduating from Memorial Composite High School in Sydney Mines, and it was during a university recruiter’s visit to her school that she first nervously began asking questions about studying at Dalhousie.

“I didn’t even know the terminology,” Ivey recalls. “What was an elective? A ‘half-credit’ or a ‘full-credit’?”

Destined for Dalhousie

Her mind was made up after taking a Dal campus tour in early fall, when the old world charm of the brick and stone buildings took her breath away. It was then, she says, she knew she was meant to don Dal’s black and gold colours, the latter echoed in the bold autumn leaves that coloured the campus.

Soon, she was spending her evenings holed up in her dorm room, flipping through pages of an introductory psychology textbook, her childhood fascination with the human brain reignited. She’d grown up with a big brother who studied psychology at Cape Breton University, and she remembers relentlessly questioning him, asking why the colour orange might look different to two people or why when she looked up into night sky the stars seemed fuzzy.

A proactive pursuit of her passion

As a university student herself, she soon noticed that many of the author’s names printed in her course textbooks taught at Dalhousie. The then first-year student began reaching out to the professors whose work intrigued her, attending some of their lab sessions where she was introduced to neuroscience by some of the country’s leading minds in the field.

“I whole-heartedly believe having made connections with some of these people has helped me get to where I am today,” says Ivey, who is now a part-time instructor of head and neck anatomy for first-year speech-language pathology students at Western University.

For the remaining years of her degree, when Ivey wasn’t spending extra hours studying or assisting other students who were having difficulty in the lab, she says she was learning to “love what you do” from professors whose passion for teaching was coupled with their rigour and painstaking dedication to research.

Continually inspired

Even after graduating from Dalhousie over three years ago and completing her Masters in Science in Clinical Anatomy at the University of Western Ontario, Ivey still finds inspiration in her Dal mentors. Recently, she watched one of her favourite professors, Dr. Victor Rafuse on national television discuss his research breakthrough in the early diagnosis of the debilitating neurological disease ALS. Now a teacher herself, Ivey hopes her own research will one day have a similar impact.