Faces of WISEST: Katarina Bohaichuk

Engineering was not always the career that I wanted to pursue. To be an engineer, I thought, one had to be mechanically inclined, love tools and building things and be…male.

This uncertainty about my interests and future career led me to apply to the 2013 WISEST Summer Research Program. I was placed in an environmental science group doing research on soil respiration. However, while this project did appeal to my love of science and the outdoors, I began to question whether environmental science was the right career for me. The WISEST advisors graciously offered to connect me with female role models in a variety of science and engineering professions in the hopes that I would gain insight into many potential career paths and stumble upon my own. Throughout the program, I met with so many other like-minded women who were just as passionate about science as I was, and this was extremely encouraging to me.

Materials engineering, as I discovered, is more than just building things. It is about understanding the chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of a material itself to assess its suitability and expected lifetime in a given application. If it were not for WISEST and the female role models I spoke with, I would never have discovered my passion for this field let alone its existence. A field that has since led me to many places – researching wear properties of tool steels in Germany, conducting failure analysis investigations and material properties testing at a local consulting firm, and now as an Integrity Engineer-in-Training at Stantec working to improve client asset integrity and inspection programs.