I distinctly remember going to John Abbott and my organic chemistry professor said that one of the up-and-coming fields was chemical engineering. He said it would be a unique career. So that’s how I decided on chemical engineering. I chose McGill because it had a fantastic reputation on the world stage, it was downtown, and I lived in Montreal.
My years at McGill led me to senior management positions, ultimately becoming the CEO of CSA Group, which is a large engineering technical organization in Canada and abroad. Before that, I was CEO of a packaging company out of Copenhagen, and I started my career with the largest chemical company in the world at the time, E. I. DuPont Canada.
From my very first year at McGill, I knew I wanted to be a senior business leader in a technical field, so I could help shape the world. In the end, I had close to a 40-year career at three companies, reaching my original goal. Recently, I wrote a book about changing corporate culture so that I could share my work experience about how you go about forming a culture in an organization.
For the past three years now, since I retired, I have enjoyed volunteering at McGill, helping students who are trying to be entrepreneurs. I’ve worked as both a judge for the goLead program as well as a mentor. So far, I’m really enjoying helping students meet their goals by sharing my experience. It’s exciting to see that young people today have huge opportunities and it’s rewarding to be able to help them.
I’ve also given back to McGill financially. Not exorbitant amounts by any means, but I’m happy to do that because McGill still has a great reputation around the world and boasts great professors and wonderful programs.
I also married a McGill graduate. My wife Wendy is a graduate of the Faculty of Education. She’s enjoyed a remarkable career in teaching, and then consulting. The funny thing is that I didn’t meet her on campus. We met at a grocery store where I was wrapping groceries and she was a cashier. That was during our second year at McGill.
My wife's uncle attended medical school at McGill and then went on to do more research at Harvard, where he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979. I remember I had only been at McGill for a year when this happened. I heard it on the radio as I was driving to work. That was an inspiring moment for me – to be going to the same university as a Nobel Prize winner.
We had a great faculty at McGill. And we had a great class. I think there were only 25 or 30 students in Chemical Engineering and one of the things we did once a week was go to have beer and pizza at a pub right outside the campus. I think there were at least 20 of us there every week. One year, the engineering students actually hijacked a Molson truck and got on the news!
The Faculty of Engineering had lots of parties during the year, but there was also lots of hard work. Chemical engineering was not an easy field. Plenty of mathematics and lots of science, and of course organic chemistry and calculus. But those were good times. I have good memories of the whole experience. 40 years ago seems like yesterday. Time flies!