MacEwan University people are at the heart of Edmonton

Wendy Brost recalls when she accepted her first job at MacEwan University in Edmonton, a newlywed starting work in an entry-level position as an event planner. That was 20 years ago, and now she’s MacEwan’s director of residence and hospitality services.

“I feel like I’ve grown up at MacEwan,” she says.

MacEwan, which began as a community college in 1971, is now a public university with a campus in the heart of Edmonton. Annette Trimbee, the university’s president and vice-chancellor, is proud of how MacEwan has evolved from the days when it held classes in a former supermarket.

“We are a key catalyst to energy in the downtown.” says Trimbee. “We bring a quarter of the city’s population into the downtown core, so that’s a big deal.”

A one-time deputy minister in the provincial government with a background in limnology (water science), Trimbee talks about life at an undergraduate university as a place for transformation.

“One of the things about university is you can see your work in action,” she says. “There’s a line of sight. When you’re a university president you see the students, you see them arrive, you see them transform, you see them walk across the stage. There’s this sense of being on the front line that you don’t really get at other institutions.”

Brost adds that working at MacEwan “feels like you’re part of something bigger than just coming to work every day. I manage a residence, so I always say we’re the biggest classroom on campus; we’re teaching them how to run the heat, how to manage their budgets, to pay rent.”

Looking back over her own career at the university, Brost says she’s grateful for the support she was given that allowed her to move from role to role, which includes access to the university’s course offerings as well as funds for continuing education and certification.

“Any time a challenge has been brought to me I’ve been able to put up my hand and it’s been accepted. We’ve had several staff start off as an administrative assistant, and they’ll get access to those learning funds and end up getting their business degree,” she says.

“I often say that you feel like you win the lottery when you work at MacEwan because of the supports that are here for you. It’s so much different than in private industry.”

Trimbee says MacEwan has created “an ecosystem, an environment where faculty are really more like entrepreneurs than most people think, because they design courses, they design research, they have to be very self–motivated. And if they thrive, then our students thrive as well. MacEwan is ubiquitous, we are everywhere.

“It’s an incredible place to learn,” she says. “You just walk down the halls and there are public lectures on everything. It’s a place buzzing with scholarly activity, so it’s really easy to get microdoses of learning every day.”

Trimbee puts this down to MacEwan’s crucial location at the heart of the city.

“We’re in the mix,” she says. “We’re everywhere downtown. Most of our graduates stay in Alberta, most of them stay in Edmonton, and our faculty and staff are very, very engaged. All these task forces and committees and not-for-profits that deal with inner city issues, they’re populated with people from MacEwan. We encourage that for our faculty and staff.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Alberta’s Top Employers winners, published January 28, 2025 in the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.