Emily Hall
Before the Chang School's Building Connections in Project Management virtual panel began, Emily Hall scanned the guest list. Finance professionals. Cybersecurity specialists. Senior project managers with decades of technical credentials. She had spent years managing something far messier: student cohorts, academic calendars, recruitment cycles, budgets, and partnerships, all without a single formal PM qualification. The imposter syndrome hit fast. "I felt like such an imposter going into that session," she admits. She almost backed out. Then she remembered exactly why she had said yes: no one else in that room was going to make the case for creatives. So she stayed, and she made it.
That moment captures where Emily Hall has spent most of her career. As an MDM Cohort 7.0 alumna and the Graduate Programming Administrator for the Master of Digital Media program, she has long sat at the intersection of artistic practice and operational rigor. This year, she formalized that intersection with the Chang School's Certificate in Project Management, and earned its highest recognition: the 2025 Nick P. Bada Award for Excellence in Project Management.
The story of how she got here starts not in a boardroom but in a darkroom. Emily came to MDM in September 2019 with an Honours BA in Photography from Sheridan College and a certificate in Fashion and Business Management from Parsons School of Design. A first-semester entrepreneurship course taught by Sean Wise changed everything. Working through the business plan assignment, she found herself drawn not to the creative output but to the architecture holding it together. Who owned which task? What had to happen first? How a team moves. "I'm actually quite good at this," she remembers thinking. She took on the organizational role deliberately because MDM felt like a safe place to try and get it wrong. That single choice set off a chain reaction: a TA position, a Career Boost role, working at the DMZ Startup Incubator, and eventually a full return to MDM as the person responsible for administering the program.
Emily had always managed complex creative projects by instinct, but formal project management training taught her effective delegation. As a freelance photographer, she handled every aspect herself, but structured project management required her to delegate and step back. "That threw me for a wobbly," she says. The certificate helped her become more flexible in her leadership and improve communication with her team. It helped her to realize that freelancers and creatives are already project managers without formal training. She now applies these skills to the MDM program, treating the academic year as a waterfall project and each semester as an agile sprint, incorporating early feedback to prevent issues.
Receiving the 2025 Nick P. Bada Award was more meaningful than Emily anticipated. Given in memory of Nick Bada, who passed away before the award was established, it resonated personally when Emily shared the news with her family. Her grandfather, who had worked with Nick at Ontario Hydro and Oakville Hydro in the 1990s, remembered him as someone dedicated to effective management for others鈥� success. "Which," Emily says, "is very similar to me." For Emily, the credential became confirmation that her journey from creative to administrator to formal project management student was intentional and valuable.
Emily鈥檚 advice to current students is based on six years of observing cohorts. She encourages students to identify which courses align with their goals. Those who benefit most from MDM arrive with clear intentions and make deliberate choices. For anyone hesitant to take risks, she shares her own experience: she accepted the business plan assignment in her first semester because it challenged her. "No failure is actually a failure," she says. "You're still moving upwards."
Emily continues to balance multiple roles. She is also rebuilding her creative presence on Instagram after a five-year hiatus, using the name "failed artist," a label she has redefined for herself. The failure was never in her photographs, but in "the failure to try."
Asked to sum up her MDM experience and everything it set in motion, she does not hesitate: "Endurance. Agile. Innovation."
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