Being chosen as the only first-year student to attend the National Conference on Women in Engineering for Waterloo A-Soc was a great achievement for me. I never thought that my very first engineering conference would provide me with such interesting set of adventures, in addition to the amazing experience that I had in Ottawa.
Our car literally blew up in Highway 401 on the way to Ottawa. I was sleeping soundly when I was awakened by an abrupt and ear-wrecking noise from the left rear end of the car. It turned out that the sound was accompanied with thick black smoke, proudly revealing itself from the back of the car. In short, we were towed to Oshawa by a friendly tow truck driver whose truck is nicknamed “Svetlana”. We got a rental car that would bring us to Ottawa, safely.
On Saturday, I had a full day listening to speakers from all over the industry that opened my mind of how amazing and diverse the engineering profession is. The speakers were great and successful women from the engineering-related industry, including: Marie Lemay (CEO of National Capital Commission), Maud Cohen (President of Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec), Valerie Davidson (NSERC/RIM Chair for Women in Science and Engineering – Ontario Region), and Howard Brown (President of Brown & Cohen) to name a few.
The conference itself was a great experience and it gave me a lot of knowledge on being a woman in the engineering profession and how to use that as an advantage in the male-dominated industry. For example, it was pointed out in the conference that women have a democratic, inclusive, collaborative, and decisive leadership style that allow them to be superb leaders.
Saturday ended with a banquet dinner that allowed us to network with more engineering students across Canada. It was really exciting to know how their engineering societies work and learn from each other. Unfortunately for younger delegates, we couldn’t follow the crowd to the well-known bar after the dinner. However, I found some other first-year students in the conference and had a night tour around downtown Ottawa. We did not need to be 19 to have a great night in Ottawa!
The next morning was another adventure. The fire alarm went off in the hotel at 8 am in the morning and two fire trucks came to the site in a few minutes. However, it turned out that nothing actually happened in the hotel. We all continued to attend the talks afterwards and headed to Waterloo at noon. Actually, we headed to Oshawa to return the rental car, and had to squeeze in Guelph delegates’ car to get to Guelph. From there, the VP External of B-Soc helped us get to Waterloo safely.
It was a great experience for my first engineering conference and I won’t forget the great three-day-journey that I had with the two other delegates: the awesome Women in Engineering directors, Amanda LeDuc and Michelle Croal.
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