Thank you for the question.
As I mentioned, my undergraduate degree is from the University of Manitoba. I have a Bachelor of Commerce with honours from the University of Manitoba. My specialization there was operational research. If you'll allow me, I'll come back to what that means. I think my mother still doesn't quite understand what operational research is.
After graduating from the University of Manitoba and working as a defence scientist at Air Command when it was in Winnipeg, I went to Stanford University in California. At Stanford I studied operational research as well. I'm not sure how it's organized anymore, but at that time operational research was within the Faculty of Engineering. I have a Master of Science degree from Stanford University from the Faculty of Engineering in operational research.
There's a description that I often give my mother, and again, I'm not quite sure she's ever understood what exactly I graduated in. There are a lot of different definitions, but the one that I often come back to is that operational research is the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make decisions. It's a subfield of mathematics. It's sometimes called management science or decision science. It has strong ties to computer science, statistics, and mathematics.