I Guess I’m Growing Up

I’ve never really understood how the transition from school to a career works, I’ve always just figured that some way or another it would figure itself out. It’s never been a tangible concept for me. For the most part, the only connection I have to the workplace is the fact that I see my parents leaving to work in the morning, and coming home at night, that’s it. We sort of live separate lives in that sense. They go to work, and I go to school, and we see each other at the end of the day, and it’s been like this for as long as I can remember. I never get to see what happens at a typical day at work for them. However this Wednesday was different.

“Take Your Kids To Work Day” is a province-wide event where grade 9 students take a day off school to go to work with their parent(s). Whether you’re going to the fire hall with Dad, or to the bank with Mum, it’s all for the same purpose, to grasp an understanding of what the workplace is like. In my case, my Mum does sales at MEC, and my dad is an engineer at Westport Innovations. I chose to go with my dad because of a few reasons. Those being that I could see myself becoming an engineer more than a sales planner, and that I hadn’t been to my dads office in a long time, and apparently it had changed a lot.

Westports campus is pretty big, it spans over multiple buildings, with different jobs allocated to certain buildings. For instance, my dad works in the Advanced Engineering sector. There’s a lot happening on site, a lot more than I thought there would be. The company put on a tour of the campus for us, showing us a lot, such as the test cells, where engines are put on a bed, hooked up to computers with wires, and are run, sending data to workers. Sadly, no photos were allowed of these, but they were pretty cool.

I was unable to interview anyone because anyone I saw was either working hard, or running in to a meeting. That being said, I did chat with all members of my dads team, and they told me loads about the skills they acquired to get their job. In fact, on my dads team, there are different “tasks” if you will. There is a coder, a creative mind, the brains (well they all have brains but you get the point), a jack of all trades as he put himself, etc. Everyone brings different elements to the table which makes for a healthy collaborative operation. So even though I don’t have visual evidence, I think I learnt what I was supposed to, and that’s the whole idea isn’t it?

Honestly, I don’t think I will be an engineer when I’m older, I would rather not sit at a desk, running numbers all day, but respect to all the people with enough patience to do just that. If I was going to work at Westport though, I would probably do the same job as my dad. He uses 3D design programs where he creates different parts for the engines Westport makes. More specifically, fuel injectors. I learned so much that I could keep going on and on about how LNG engines work, but that’s not the point of this whole thing. Most importantly, I got to see what the workplace is like, first hand, and I definitely have a much better understanding of what the future may look like for myself.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.