November 6th was Take Your Kid To Work Day here in B.C. For Take Your Kid To Work Day I went with my uncle to Stantec, an engineering services company. Stantec as a company has completed many large projects including; Vancouver International Airport, Cerro Corona Gold Mine in Peru, Panama Canal Expansion, Tesla Water Treatment Facility in California, and the Cancer centre at Guy’s Hospital in London. At stantec there are many departments, ranging from electrical engineering to marketing to what my uncle does, way-finding. Way-finding is a form of graphic design focused on signage and directing people.

Stantec is a large company, so there were 13 other kids there. They had us do a team-building exercise where the goal was to build a lego house in the same style  that a actual construction site would use. The first time we did it we failed, so we then debriefed what went wrong and did it again, but with better instructions. By doing this exercise I realized that my passion to be in charge really showed, I find that I find it easer to work with other people when I have control over the situation.

While I was at Stantec I noticed that as I talked to different people, each person had a different perspective on the projects they were doing. For example someone who worked on interior design would think about how to make people feel comfortable, where as someone in  structural engineering would think about how they could create a building that could preform its intended function as well as being aesthetically pleasing.

Another thing I noticed was the fact that people in certain areas of work would have similar personality types, an example of this being that someone in marketing would be more extroverted than someone in electrical engineering, as they would have to be making contact with others in order to improve the companies outreach and marketing strategies.

Overall I really enjoyed my time at Stantec not just because of all the kind people, but because my dream job is in the engineering field, though not the civil one (read about that here!).

-Finn