Deanna Burgart, a third-year chemical engineering student, won $5,000 and an all-expense paid trip to the Foundation’s annual awards luncheon in Quebec City in May.
The scholarship is one of 16 awarded by the Foundation and partnering companies in honour of 14 women engineering students who were gunned down at Montreal’s École Polytechnique December 6, 1989.
Burgart, who traces her ancestry to the Fond du Lac band in Saskatchewan, dropped out of school as a teenager.
She subsequently returned to school as a single parent to earn a high school diploma and realized she had an aptitude for math and sciences.
“I was going through the process of deciding on a career and someone asked me if I had thought about engineering,” she recalled. “I felt pressured at the time to get a certificate or diploma and start working as soon as possible because it was just me and my son.”
Burgart graduated from a two-year chemical engineering program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in 2000 and worked in the oil and gas industry for seven years before deciding to return to school again at the age of 32.
“I got to the point where I saw myself going in the direction of management and decided the next step would be for me to get a degree.”
She chose Lakehead because it’s one of the few universities in Canada with a transfer program for college graduates, allowing her to qualify for a BSc in two to two and a half years.
In college, she was one of four or five women out of 60 students in the chemical engineering program. At Lakehead, she said, the gender split is about 50:50.
To qualify for the scholarship, she had to write an essay, submit letters of reference and film herself making a 20 to 30-minute presentation encouraging high school girls to consider a career in engineering. All 16 scholarship winners are required to make presentations promoting engineering as a career choice for women.
“We’re seeing more women choosing engineering as a profession and I think it’s up to people like me and other women who have chosen this profession to encourage young women to follow in our footsteps,” said Burgart.
A second AMEC scholarship was won by Joanne Bailey, a mechanical engineering student at McMaster University.
Vale Inco sponsors four $10,000 Foundation scholarships to encourage women to pursue studies in mining and metallurgical engineering, or a related engineering discipline. The winners are also offered summer jobs at Vale Inco operations.
“Investing in a new generation of engineers is important,” said Michael Joliffe, a senior vice president with AMEC. “These scholarships are one way to cultivate and leverage the talents of Canadians to embrace an engineering career filled with challenge and opportunity.”
AMEC, a consulting engineering and project management company, recently completed an engineering, procurement and construction management contract for the Victor Diamond Mine, in Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands.
