The Final Blog

September 14, 2018 3:04 pm Published by Leave your thoughts

Considering it’s the last week of September already, I guess I can officially say that summer is over 🙁 Luckily for me though, that doesn’t mean the end of my work term! My position with Tolko actually runs for 8 months, which means I will still be working here until December. As all of the other summer bloggers are undoubtedly heading back to school to finish their studies, I will just be gearing up for another exciting 3 months of work. I won’t miss out on all of the university fun though, as I am actually taking 1 course this semester while I work. I guess you could say I’m living the best of both worlds, school and work! Maybe I’m crazy, but I quite enjoy them both.

With my summer of blogging for FPAC coming to an end, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on my time working at Tolko so far. It has been a busy and extremely rewarding 5 months filled with learning, testing new ideas, building, prototyping, and many frustrated moments. Working for Tolko has by far been the greatest work experience I’ve ever had. Not only have I had the opportunity to work with wicked cool technology, but the staff I work with is also amazing. My supervisor, Dwayne, has answered just about a million of my questions that I’ve been asking on the daily, and has shown a ridiculous amount of patience with my “cautious” approach to testing. It only took 5 months, but I am finally feeling comfortable in my position and have a somewhat broad knowledge of how things work here (there’s just so much to know!). Thinking back to my first week working here, where I had no clue what to do, I can definitely say I’ve come a long way. I’m not going to lie, I was very nervous to start this job. Not only did I know next to nothing (okay actually nothing) about how a mill operates, but I knew that I would most likely be one of the youngest employees and one of few female employees as well. Well I wasn’t wrong about that, without a question I brought the average age down by a number of years, and I happen to be the only female that works in my building. As intimidating as that was at first, it gave me an opportunity to break some stereotypes and show what I had to offer. As a girl in engineering, I’m very used to being the minority in a group and I love getting chances to show that “girl power” isn’t just something we sing about. And GIRLS if you’re reading this, I strongly encourage you to challenge yourself to study engineering or a STEM related field. We need more of us in this industry!

I would also like to say that I am very grateful to FPAC for giving me this opportunity to share about my work experience in the Forest Products Industry, and to shed a little bit of light on what a job in Control Systems looks like. I am also thankful for the GoPro that they provided to me that made documenting this summer so much easier!

And now I am going to leave you all with a riddle, simply because I love riddles.

A man leaves home on foot, he takes three lefts and returns back home to find two men wearing masks. Who are these men and why are they there?

No cheating and googling it. If you know the answer, comment below.

And with that, I’m out!

Thank you for following along with my adventures this summer 🙂

As always, keep exploring.

Jess Rempel

Hint: one of the men is against him and the other is neutral.

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