AEF CAMPAIGN CONNECTION
When he was an international student, scholar- ships helped Volodymyr Vragov, G.I.T., finance the costs of living and learning overseas. Today, he’s working towards his P.Geo. designation. -photo courtesy Volodymyr Vragov, G.I.T.
Volodymyr Vragov, G.I.T., 23 University of Alberta (B.Sc. Geophysics) Class of 2014
As a youth in Ukraine, Mr. Vragov always wanted to study abroad. He was accepted into several different universities in Canada and the United States, but chose the U of A because of its excellent physics program. He was also awarded a prestigious U of A Scholastic Distinction scholarship, which helped solidify his decision. It paid for his first year’s tuition at the U of A, while subsequent scholarships over the next few years — including a $1,000 award from the APEGA Education Foundation — helped him finance the costs of living and learning overseas. “Scholarships really helped me to concentrate on the most important things — my studying, the research I was doing while at school, and my volunteering with the geophysics undergraduate society,” he says. At first, being an international student was a challenge. “I had never been to an English-speaking country before. It was all a little bit of a shock,” he says. Although he had learned English in Ukraine, it was more academic than conversational. But living in a dorm for the first eight months and working as a research assistant helped immerse him in the language and culture of his new home. Today, he’s excited to be working towards his P.Geo. and is looking forward to seeing where his geoscience degree takes him, whether in Canada or elsewhere. “The doors are open. We’ll see what kind of opportunities show up later down the road.”
When Volodymyr Vragov, G.I.T., left Ukraine in 2011 to study physics at the University of Alberta, he never imagined that a few years later he’d be training to be a geoscientist. Arriving in Canada at 19 years young, his career goal was to work in the aerospace industry or be a space physics researcher. He had already studied physics for two years at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, then spent another year in the U of A’s physics program — including exciting research that involved launching a rocket in the Norwegian Sea as part of the CaNoRock student exchange program. But after befriending students in the U of A’s geophysics program in the Faculty of Science, he had an aha moment that altered his career path trajectory. “They showed me how cool the program is, so I transferred into geophysics,” he says. “It’s a combination of geology, physics, even a little bit of coding and computational science. Also, there is an amaz- ing geoscience community at the school. I really liked their spirit and unity — it’s a great group of people interested in the same thing.” Since graduating, he’s moved again, this time to Calgary to work in technology deployment at Shell Canada. “We’re developing new work flows to help geoscientists either speed up their work or make it easier for them to get better results out of the data they have,” explains Mr. Vragov. “It’s a lot of learning, but a very interesting combination of a few disciplines, including a bit of rock physics, geophysics, and some geology.”
38 | PEG FALL 2015
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker