PROFILE
TRAVEL POSE Laurie Slezak, P.Geol., has been around the world. But sights close to home, like Yellowstone National Park in northwestern U.S., are well worth a visit, too. -photo courtesy Laurie Slezak, P.Geol.
“Volunteering with APEGA broadens you; that’s how I see it. It makes you bigger than yourself.”
around the world. But her childhood dream to become a geologist almost ended before it even began. In Grade 11, she visited the University of Manitoba to find out what classes she should take to get into the honours geology program. “Dear,” she was told, “young women do not get honours geology degrees because we do not have the facilities for them.” What facilities were those? Students in the program had to go to field schools, and the university wasn’t able to provide wash- rooms or housing for females. After high school, Ms. Slezak ended up working for a couple of years, trying to decide on a career path. And then Canada changed. It was 1979, and the Canadian Human Rights Act had passed. The legislation made it clear that universities had to provide equal access to their programs. Ms. Slezak applied for the U of M’s honours geology program and was accepted — one of only two women in the class. She graduated in 1984, then began working on a master’s degree in modern sedimentology. Her professors decided to send her resume to a few oil companies in Calgary. The companies aren’t hiring, they told her, but applying is a good chance to network. But Ms. Slezak was offered a job, and that was too good an opportunity to pass up. That’s how she found herself moving to Calgary during a major recession and work- ing full time while completing her master’s. “I wasn’t actually planning on working in oil and gas. There were few jobs out there, very similar in many ways to where we’re at today,” she remembers. She’s glad she took the chance. The decision changed the course of her career and her life, leading her to work on vari- ous oil and gas, environmental, mining, and government restructuring projects across Canada and around the globe, from Tanzania and Rwanda to China and Australia.
She knew all this from reading An Introduction to Historical Geology , a used university textbook her parents had bought her. “I was one of those kids,” Ms. Slezak says with a laugh. “My parents could never explain my interest, because neither of them were into geology. But people who remem- ber me from grade school are not surprised I’m a geologist.” And that textbook? Count it among her most prized possessions.
Laurie Slezak, P.Geol., FGC, FEC (Hon.), was a girl of four or five when she starting collecting rocks. By the time she was eight, she was leading geology tours around the schoolyard at recess, explaining to her fellow students how fossils came to be embedded in the Tyndall limestone facade at Winnipeg’s Linwood Elementary School. The fossils, she told them, were about 450 million years old. They had cool names like trilobite, brachiopod, and stromatopo- roid. Part of Manitoba, she explained, was once covered by an ocean. When the sea creatures died, their remains settled into the ocean floor, hardened, and eventually turned into limestone.
THE PERSEVERANCE PAYOFF
Ms. Slezak recently retired after a three- decade career in geology that took her
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