Five-year-old Miles Patterson knows the McMaster campus better than most undergrad students.

That’s because he’s been a fixture here since he was a toddler, accompanying his mother Ashleigh, who will graduate with a geography degree in the Faculty of Social Sciences Wednesday.

It’s been an interesting journey for Ashleigh, who has juggled the demands of a family, a full course load, extracurricular activities and volunteer work over the years.

Her husband, Jonathan, is also a full-time student in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, which meant there were days when Miles was ferried back and forth from parent to parent between classes.

“I owe a lot of people some baked goods for all the babysitting they did for us,” she laughs.

Patterson, who will continue at McMaster as a graduate student in the fall, first enrolled in linguistics but when she took an elective course – Intro to Human Geography, Society & Culture—she ‘fell in love’ with geography.

Since those early days, she has won two USRAs, focusing her research on Hamilton rental units within private homes—basement apartments, in-law suites and guest houses, for example—also known as secondary housing.

“I came to this with a unique perspective,” she says. “While other students grew up in homes their parents owned, I didn’t. I always lived in secondary housing.”

The statistics on how many units exist in the city are spotty but Patterson found that residents are largely happy with their living arrangements. And not surprisingly, the closer the landlord—whether they might live in the same house or in the neighbourhood—the happier the tenant.

In the fall, she will tackle a new research track for her graduate work: caregiver employees and the struggle to balance everything.

She will come to it with first-hand experience. With a young child and a demanding academic career, balancing is a skill Patterson mastered years ago.