Engineer content with northern life

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Diana Adams, a 26-year-old member of Mikisew Cree First Nation who works for Syncrude Canada Ltd. in Fort McMurray, says "probably the power" is the reason she was attracted to a career in engineering. At Syncrude, where Adams has been employed since graduating from the University of Alberta with a civil/environmental engineering degree in 1996, "I'd say 90 per cent of the managers are engineers. "I don't think I'd want to be the CEO of the company," continued Adams, "but I'd like to have some say in what goes on.

"For the big companies I would say engineering is the top profession," adds Adams. But a lot of smaller northern Alberta businesses that don't need engineering design rely on technical staff such as process engineers or process operators. These people run gas plants in the area and do a lot of the bush work, and typically have a two-year college diploma she says.

Adams can't pinpoint when she made the decision to enter engineering, but when she was in grade 10 or 11, a woman engineer, also employed at Syncrude, got her interested during a high school career day. It helped that Adams says she "really enjoyed math," and her marks were in the 80s. "For me it came easy. It's the only thing I had an interest in."

Math may have been a simple subject, but university wasn't exactly a breeze. "I found it a lot more harder, I would say, than the men did. I don't know why, but it was a lot more of a struggle for me than for most of the men in engineering." Adams said, though, that all students had to contend with loneliness, being away from their families, financial worries, and homework that "sort of takes over your life."

"I wasn't going to give up, but it was still hard," she said. She spent a year at Keyano College in Fort McMurray before attending three-and-a-half years at U of A.

She credits her band for the financial support that helped her make it through: "They made it a lot easier for me and for that I'm very thankful," she said. "I think if I had been, let's say, a white person and not having that opportunity, it would have been a lot harder decision for me to make, to have to be struggling for that four years. I was struggling, but even more so if I had not had any financial support."

Adams is conscious she is now in a position to be a role model for youth. She helps organize science camps for young people in the summers and the advice she gives them is "Don't quit school, and if the money's there, take it. Do something with your life."

In addition, Adams is a member of the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Technology Society. After work, she and a few others are working on setting up a chapter in Fort McMurray, and taking on activities such as the summer camps.

Adams was born and raised in Fort McMurray, her father was a Syncrude employee, and she worked at the plant three summers while still a student. "I just knew that I would work here; I never applied anywhere else," she says forthrightly. "I don't really want to leave McMurray-I love it here."

That makes Adams fit the profile of the person Syncrude prefers to hire: the right academic background and demonstrated competence, and from the community with a stake in its future.