Carol Ann Budd

Carol Ann Budd's brother Raymond influenced her to go back to school when he earned a Business Administration degree and then a Law degree. "He was an excellent example, he influenced me the most to succeed and pursue an education."

School was very challenging for Carol Ann. At the time, she had to juggle schoolwork and life as a mother of two young children. She admits the toughest thing about school was "I missed being with my kids when I had to spend weekends doing schoolwork - having to put your family and friends lower on your priority list at times was difficult." Because she always imagined herself in a lab setting working with numbers, she was determined to finish her degree. She is really glad she did because she believes that "with a degree, you will have many employment opportunities that will allow you to develop your leadership abilities."

In 1989, Carol Ann graduated from Queen's University with a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. She began her 20-year career in engineering with Dupont Canada (later Invista) in Kingston, Ontario. Being part of a global team, she got to work with people from all over the world. Her job was to design and lead experimental work, analyze the results and extract implications to the company’s products, customers and business. Communication also played a key role in her job, as she then shared knowledge gained from the experimental work with the technical marketing team and customers.

Carol Ann now works as a consultant, taking with her many transferable skills. “My engineering training taught me how to problem-solve, to work effectively with numbers, to analyze situations and to communicate clearly with others. All of these are skills I still use in my present work, even though that work now lies outside the field of engineering.”

For almost ten years, Carol Ann was active with a professional organization called CASTS (Canadian Aboriginal Science and Technology Society), whose mission was to attract and retain Indigenous peoples in science and to promote excellence in their fields of chosen study. This organization did a number of elementary school outreach projects associated with the cities in which annual conferences were held.

Carol Ann is happy to continue encouraging Indigenous youth through her involvement with Aboriginal Access to Engineering at Queen’s University. She would like to encourage Indigenous students to not only stay in school but to take as many math and science courses as they can because "you will have an enormous range of choices available to you and it will be easier to get the jobs you want." She adds, "the skills and training you learn can make a positive difference in your community and are necessary to provide the infrastructure for economic development and self-sufficiency."

In her spare time, Carol Ann enjoys cooking with her daughters, being outdoors and enjoying life at the family’s cottage in Biscotasing, northern Ontario.

See also:

Campus life 'allowed me to claim my history' (Queen's Gazette)

Be leaders and changemakers, urges Aboriginal champion (Queen's Gazette)

Two-Eyed Seeing considers traditional knowledge and western science equally (Turtle Island Native Network)

Carol Ann Budd on Twitter