Nida Sajid counts herself lucky to have landed a job during the pandemic – and even luckier to find one that offers a wide range of opportunities for newly minted chemical engineers.
Sajid, who graduated from Ryerson with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering in 2020, works as an Associate-in-Training with Montreal-based IPEX Group of Companies. The company makes thermoplastic materials for systems that convey water, chemicals, gases, power and data cabling.
“Thermoplastic piping and waste water treatment did well during COVID,” she says. “It’s a necessity: everywhere you go, you need piping to transport different materials.”
She is part of the company’s associate-in-training program, which rotates recent graduates through various six-month postings so they can learn everything from project engineering and innovation to exports. So far, Sajid has worked on a waste water treatment plant in Costa Rica, drainage valves for excess water in electrical conduit in British Columbia and a project to design molding and extrusion products in the U.S.
Sajid is pleased to have been able to put her education in heat transfer and thermodynamics to good use. She’s also grateful for the soft-skills she learned at university – communications and project management for example.
She honed some of those skills during her work with student groups such as the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering, Ryerson Student Chapter, and Women in Engineering. She volunteered with Ryerson’s First Year Ambassador program, where she helped first year students navigate their way through university and ran workshops for students and their parents.
Sajid is also an aspiring writer, having written an article for CICNews on the environmental impact of improperly recycling solar panels.
“I took a course called “Technology in the Contemporary Environment” and found people use solar panels and expect their greenhouse gas emissions to go down. But people don’t look at the life cycle,” she says.
Today, Sajid volunteers with the Energy Division of the Chemical Institute of Canada as a past student representative and current industrial liaison and technical writer. She hopes to one day work as a consultant or project manager in some facet of chemical engineering.