A scholarship, an internship, and a job offer. For any recent college grad, that’s the best hat trick you can score.
Tally up the win for two members of NBCC’s Class of 2022. Building Engineering Technology graduates Dana Nielsen and Hongyu Lan each received a $2,500 Stantec Student in Engineering Bursary, which came with six-week internships at Stantec. Halfway through their internships, they have both been offered full-time employment with the company, which they have accepted.
“Everything is kind of falling nicely into place,” said Dana. “The bursary side of it was nice, but the opportunity to do an internship here…I had researched Stantec for a project in my first year and realized that the company really lined up with a lot of my interests. So the opportunity to be here is absolutely fantastic.”
“There is definitely a lot to learn here, because it is such a big firm,” added Hongyu. “That was very tempting to me.”
With 25,000 employees in more than 400 locations across six continents, Stantec is, indeed, a big firm with a lot of subject matter experts on tap. But it’s also a company that remembers its roots. At its inception in 1954, it was a one-person operation. Throughout its growth and evolution in the ensuing 68 years, the sense of community has remained a constant, said Carolynne Soucy, Marketing Specialist.
“We’re a very community-oriented firm,” she said. “It’s in our slogan, we always design with community in mind. We love that we can support the community by supporting NBCC.”
Knowing NBCC’s reputation for hands-on, experiential learning, Stantec established the six-week internship as part of the bursary program to provide recipients with real-world, on-the-job experience, with the hope of recruiting them for full-time jobs. It certainly worked for Dana and Hongyu.
Building Engineering Technology is a new career for both Dana and Hongyu, who came to NBCC as mature learners. At 46, Dana wanted to ensure he chose his next career wisely. He was interested in engineering, and his research indicated he’d have a good chance at finding employment in the field if he attended NBCC.
“I found NBCC had very high employment rates, so I knew I was going to benefit from the NBCC education and graduate with marketable skills,” he noted.
Hongyu emigrated to Canada in 2012 and worked various jobs in the service industry until COVID-19 sidelined her. She was relieved to receive employment insurance, but wasn’t satisfied with just waiting for another job to come along.
“I wanted to be able to make my own living, and government pointed me to this opportunity,” she said. “I had been renovating our house and got interested in buildings, so this program was interesting to me. Then I found out that the employment rate for NBCC is so high, that made my mind up.”
