“In real life things are going to go wrong.” That, says Karon Kelly Cambridge, is one of the key lessons she tries to impart to her Esthetician/Spa Management students. This is something she took away from the program when she studied in it herself. Cambridge likes how the Humber instructors taught her how to deal with people.
“When you’re running a spa, people are going to cancel their appointments or vendors might have trouble delivering supplies on time. You need to be able to manage all that.”
Managing all that is something Cambridge could give lessons in, what with learning to be a teacher taught her, spending time in class, holding down a full-time job, and raising a pre-teen. The graduate of the Esthetician/Spa Management diploma program has come to teaching via an unusual path that leaves her uniquely prepared to help her students.
Originally from Trinidad & Tobago, Cambridge is a chemical engineer by training. Her dream? Opening a destination spa. She liked working with people and with her management experience she saw that she could use her science and engineering background to develop programs and products. She earned a cosmetology diploma at the Aveda Institute in Puerto Rico and her subsequent search for an all-round spa-centred program that was short in duration but uncompromising on content led her to Humber’s one-year diploma covering esthetics and management.
What sold Cambridge on Humber was the tour of the facilities and campus, how convincing the evident strengths of the program were, and the personal attention she received from the co-ordinator during her tour. For an international student, she found this empathetic, human touch, truly winning.
Cambridge considers her Humber student experience, from September 2008 to August 2009, even richer than she thought it would be.
“The content was more impressive than it appeared in the curriculum. I was impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the instructors. All of them were in the industry and passionate about it,” discovering the teaching to be practical, vibrant and thorough.
Cambridge developed an easy rapport with her teachers, who provided her with a lot of insider learning, as well as basics in proper hygiene, technique and proper conduct in the spa environment. Describing the program as “comprehensive, solid and relevant,” she learned the realities of the beauty industry through case studies, practical scenarios and role-play. Feeling completely prepared, she knew what questions to ask and what to expect as she journeyed along her new path.
Post-graduation, Cambridge worked at gaining as broad a reach of experience in the industry as possible, planning to open a day-spa in Toronto and later a destination spa in the Caribbean when she got a call from the Associate Dean of The Business School at Humber. Cambridge had earned the highest grade in the program, had acquired all sorts of experience in the industry and was passionate about cosmetics, and so the Dean wanted to know if she'd be interested in teaching the Cosmetic Product Knowledge course. Of course, this happy accident dovetailed perfectly with Cambridge's goals, and she's now learned a lot about herself by becoming an instructor and is moving forward by building off of that momentum.
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