Director of Infrastructure and Development
I got into the water industry by accident. I had been living and finished my school in Alberta so I assumed that I would end up working a career in the oilfield, but that never happened. I started working in operations department at a compost facility where we dewatered biosolids and co-composed it with wastewater through a friends parent after a long unsuccessful job search. I worked there for a while and fell in love with the idea of making a positive impact on the world. I eventually got transferred into a design group where I got to work on water reservoirs and upgrades at a WWTP facility.
I fell in love with the water industry, the people I got to work with/for, and found it super rewarding to be able to drive around and see permanent pieces of infrastructure that I worked on which made things better for those communities. It was and still is a huge source of pride for me to see those things that I’ve worked on. I now work in municipal government running public works and water departments and am motivated daily seeing the impacts of the work my team gets done or not, and making strategic moves to improve my communities water and wastewater infrastructure.
If I had any advice for younger staff or intermediate staff wanting to progress in their career it would unquestionably be “get involved as a volunteer”. At one point in my journey was working with an executive coach got talked into getting involved planning networking and light training events for YPs and got to meet all sorts of people in our industry. Getting involved helped to develop leadership skills and understand governance in a new way in addition to giving back to an industry that I love. I can, without any shadow of a doubt, contribute where I am in my career and workplace directly to the decision to start getting involved with volunteering.
I have a long career left, but I can’t imagine working outside of water. Even as my role changes and evolves away from less technical work – I keep coming back and wanting to stay in this amazing community.
Jacobs | Process Engineer
My water story started in 2008-2009; it was one or two years after finishing my bachelor program in Civil Engineering. I had decided to continue my education at graduate level and had a couple of options to narrow down to a sub-discipline, such as structural, geotechnical, environmental, roads, transportation, to name a few. When I started pondering the topic, I found myself keen on looking “within” instead of “beyond” to find my destined path; my contemplations helped me to understand which sub-discipline resonates with personal aspirations, rather than just paying attention to market trends and the associated career aspirations.
Through high school to bachelor program, I had focused nonstop on many numerical and calculation-based disciplines, with less human touches than I would hope for: physics, mathematics, and then in the university, statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, fluid mechanics, and others. I was always fascinated by the psychology of sociology. Even though I never pursued this interest academically, one of my hobbies was contemplating how cultural and social norms form an entangled network of behavioral patterns at individual and societal levels.
I found myself in need of working on or with something that resembles more human interactions and social behaviors… and that led me to environmental engineering. Knowing that some parts of wastewater treatment require working with microorganisms, I thought interactions between microorganisms could very much mimic human society at a micro scale… and continuing my education at graduate levels and working on graduate projects that I worked on (biological wastewater treatment projects) proved I was not wrong. The more I worked on biological wastewater treatment, the more I developed a fascination about single cellular microbial communities and their similarities to human societies and interactions. This is how I ended up becoming a process engineer in water / wastewater with a keen focus on biological processes such as secondary treatment and biosolids management.