John Baird suffered from chronic health conditions from early in life and, so, did not complete his secondary schooling until the age of 19.
After spending an additional year in Toronto working in Kirschmann's laboratory, Baird traveled to Europe for graduate study.
Two years later, still without a PhD, Baird transferred to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where he studied under the famed structuralist psychologist, Edward Bradford Titchener.
In addition, the strong relationship Baird formed with Titchener during this time deeply influenced the rest of his career.
Baird worked as an instructor in psychology at Johns Hopkins University, under the direction of the child psychologist and evolutionist James Mark Baldwin from 1904 to 1906.
He also contributed a chapter (Baird, 1917b) to another Festschrift in honor of the retirement of Cornell philosophy professor James Edwin Creighton, who had been the founding president of the American Philosophical Association (and was a fellow Canadian).
Also in 1917, Hall, Baird, and another Clark professor named Ludwig R. Geissler collectively founded a new periodical, the Journal of Applied Psychology.
During his term he was called to Washington D.C. to serve as Vice-Chair of the National Research Council's Psychological Committee, a position in which he developed a program for the assessment and rehabilitation of injured soldiers returning from the war.
Although it is not clear what his medical problem was (it may have been a recurrence of the renal condition that had periodically afflicted him since his youth), he underwent three surgeries over the next few months.