Two weekends ago was the annual Professional Engineers of Ontario Student Conference (PEOSC) held by York University. Waterloo Engineering took eight delegates, with both VP Externals. This is an annual conference run by Engineering Student Societies’ Council of Ontario (ESSCO). This conference is a place for brilliant engineering minds to share ideas and reflect on current engineering issues. The goal of this conference is to aid in the professional development and success of student leaders by featuring industry professionals, renowned keynote speaks and professional development workshops.
The theme of the conference this year was “Engineers Changing the World”, and to go along with this theme there were many industry professionals on hand to speak and share their experiences.
To start off the conference roughly 15 delegates were taken to a lunch at Queens Park, hosted by PEO. During this lunch we heard the MMP for Scarborough Soo Wong. Soo Wong is the Parliamentary Assistant to Brad Duguid, the Minister of training Colleges and Universities and also holds many positions on different committees throughout the provincial government. She is a very strong advocate for healthy living for her patrons as she is a trained nurse and her talk about all of her advocacies was very inspirational.
Saturday was by far the best and most informational day of the conference. There were 8 speakers in total, and I have to say, it was the best line up of speakers at a conference I have ever experienced. There were three speakers that really stood out for me. This first one is Jim Gray; he is a Senior Associate for Sussex Strategy, which is one of Canada’s leading government relations firms. He is an accomplished speaker, writer and presentation skills coach. He spoke on presentation skills and ways to improve your presentations and his ability to engage an audience is astonishing.
The second speaker that really stood out was Jackie Lee, she is by far the most successful and accomplished person I have ever met. Jackie is a grad of Waterloo and currently runs a company named ‘Recruit my Friends’ of which she is the founder of. Recruit my Friends is a leader for Engineering Recruiting for new and recent graduate engineers as well as coops in the software industry. With a team of 50 Engineering Talent Managers, she refers engineers through a network of connections to start-ups across Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Boston and Silicon Valley. Jackie invests in many companies around North America and is a very goal driven person. She is striving to be the world’s youngest female Billionaire. She was a very inspirational speaker and I will definitely be following her from now on.
And finally there was Drew Dudley. This guy is amazing; he is a speaker that talks about Leadership Development. The things that set him so far apart from most speakers at a conference like this is his ability to make the audience laugh. He has so many jokes and funny stories packed into his informative presentation that makes the experience so much better. He shares real world experiences that made him who he is today.
I would recommend anyone reading this article look up all three of the speakers I have talked about, they all have amazing stores and inspirational lives.
Then came Saturday night, for the Saturday night event we went to Second City, a comedy club/theatre. It was an absolutely hilarious show and was an amazing pick by the organizers.
Overall this conference was a very rewarding experience. I would like to thank Dean Sullivan for helping fund the trip for the delegates and our VP Ex’s Leila Meema-Coleman and Kristina Lee for taking our 8 delegates. I would also like to congratulate York University on a great job planning the conference.
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