 Following his program at UBC he was accepted to the engineering program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he earned a master's degree in 1961 and PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1964.As an undergraduate student at UBC, MacDonald spent his first three summers on a survey crew in Northern British Columbia.After his fourth and fifth years he worked as a student engineer at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, where he met his future wife, Alfredette, before moving to Boston to attend MIT.