Sarah Rosanna Busch

I grew up in a small town in North Western Ontario. I got my first job, a paper route, when I was eleven years old. I also had several babysitting clients at the same time. I loved making money, I think because it made me feel independent and mature. I was willing to work hard for it, but I had limits - even though I was qualified to be a lifeguard by the time I was in grade 7 (which paid relatively well) I wasn't willing to wake up at 5am to work a shift before school like they wanted. Early mornings have never been my friend. So I started working at my dad's hardware store after school instead. My first task there was counting screws, literally. It was boring as hell, but this was in 1997 and the store had just purchased its first computer. They were in the process of setting it up to manage their inventory and sales. It had a rudimentary form-based operating system that my dad and his bookkeeper were studying hard to figure out. Once I had finished taking inventory of the wall of fasteners I was tasked with entering it into the system. It turned out all those weekends playing "Snake", "Chip's Challenge", and a DOS version of "Missile Command", were going to pay off. I had no problem figuring out the system so after that I spent my afternoons helping to bring that store into the computer age.

 

I continued to work at North American Lumber through high school, working the till, receiving shipments, and helping out in the office with the paperwork. After highschool I moved to Toronto to go to York University. For personal and financial reasons I only attended for one year, and at the end of it I was contacted by the new manager of NAL (my dad had moved on by this point and had rebooted his construction company). Their bookkeeper/office manager was on maternity leave for another six months and they were unhappy with their current replacement for her; They offered me the job in her place. Mostly I managed the cash, balanced the books, and sent out monthly invoices to our account holders. It turned out that I was able to get all of that work done by noon most days, but since I was getting paid by the hour and had to sit at that desk all day anyway to answer the phone. I started filling out the accounting books, with my left hand, which up until that point had been more or less useless to me. To this day I am still relatively ambidextrous because of that, which has been a real asset because most of the jobs I've had since then have been very hands on.

 

At the end of that six months I moved back to Toronto with no clear plan of what I was going to do with my life, I just knew that I wasn't going to figure it out in Fort Frances. I moved in with three roommates that I had met living in residence the year before and started looking for work. I grabbed a newspaper one day and found an ad in the classifieds that just said "$10 per hour, plus commissions". I called the number and they immediately told me a time to come in to interview. I still wasn't clear on what the job was, but I figured there was no harm in going in to find out. It turned out it was a group interview for a call centre. I'm pretty sure the only qualification they were looking for was being available from 5pm to 10pm every weekday. I have always hated talking on the phone, I was a very shy kid, and small talk never came naturally to me, so when BTS called me the next day to tell me "You got the job!" I didn't really want it, but I had rent to pay so I took it, telling myself it would just be until I found something better. They give you a script at call centres, so for my first phone call I just read it, my heart pounding with anxiety. When I got to the line where I was supposed to get their credit card information I called my manager over like he had told me to do the first time I got there. It was my first call, he was shocked. It turns out that when you're selling "Promotional Vacation Packages" you're doing really well if you make one sale a day. That first sale didn't end up going through, but the fact that I had gotten so far on my first call made me a golden child in my boss's eyes. I did really well at that place and managed to save up quite a bit of money, but it was the kind of job where I had to leave my sense of morality at the door when I walked in, so when a manager position came up which my boss encouraged to apply for, I quit instead.

 

I decided at that point to go back to school, partly because I realized I was never going to reach my full potential in the unskilled labour force, but mostly because I kept hearing my mom's voice in my head telling me that's what I should be doing.  I decided to try college this time because it was significantly cheaper, provided much more hands on experience, and had a higher graduate employment rate.  I wanted to study science because I wanted to learn how everything in the universe works. That may sound naively ambitious, but I was born with an intense curiosity about the truth of things, and the answer I got from my Catholic school teachers about the more complex questions about the world was always met with "because God made it that way", an answer that left me extremely unsatisfied. My initial inclination was towards physics, but since that isn't offered as a diploma program, I landed on chemistry, which was perfect because it taught me how matter (all the stuff I could see and touch and manipulate) works, which really appealed to the part of me that loves to create things.

 

I didn't work during the school year while I was at Seneca, because I wanted to treat my studies as a full-time job...and because I developed small-ish addiction to World of Warcraft during those years that took up most of my spare time. But I did go back to Fort Frances whenever I had a break to work construction with my dad, which I have done on several occasions since. Even though I never had any desire to join the family business permanently I have always really enjoyed the physical labour and I find real satisfaction in collecting practical skills. Learning how houses are built, from the ground up, has proven to be useful in many aspects of both my personal and professional life.

 

I moved to Victoria in 2009 after graduating from Seneca with an Advanced Diploma in Chemical Engineering Technology, where after a summer of working in a methadone pharmacy and then on a roofing job, I found a job as a Chemist at Axys Analytical Services. They are one of very few chemistry labs on the island, and they do environmental analysis. Since I had done one of my college co-op terms at the Ontario Ministry of the Environment it was a perfect fit. The first two years I worked there completely validated all of the life choices I had made up until that point. I had more in common with the other analysts there than I had ever had with any group of people, ever. And I was really good at the job. They were on a cross-department training kick when I started there, which meant that during my first year there I got trained in four different departments - perfect for the girl who is happiest when she's learning. I started in Sample Reception, which is essentially the same thing as the inventory management I had done at North American Lumber. Then I moved in to Sample Prep. Those six months were probably my favourite at Axys because everyday we had a new and different challenge. Sample Prep is where we took the samples in their whole form, whether it be a bunch of frozen fish or small animals, or a jar of soil, water, or poop, and pick out all the parts that weren't to be analyzed, and finally homogenize the parts that were. For those of you who don't know, homogenize means chop up, grind, blend, and/or mix the shit out of something until it is just one big mass of goo that has the same consistency, on a chemical level, all the way through. After sample prep I did a brief stint in Extraction, where you take the homogenized samples and do some form of extraction to remove the majority of the unwanted molecules and compounds from the samples. After this point virtually every sample is a clear liquid and is sent to Columning, the department where I spent most of the rest of my time at Axys. Columning consists of reducing your samples by evaporation, building chromatographic columns (packing powders in to a glass column), and eluting the reduced sample through these columns with a specific succession of carefully measured volumes of solvents. For most samples this process must be repeated up to four times. Evaporate, elute, repeat. This job requires excellent dexterity, time management, and memorization of the volitility and solubility of all the different ultra-trace persistent organic pollutents that we were testing for. I was great at this job. Axys is a private company, so their bottom line is to make money. This means pushing as many samples through the lab as quickly as possible. I was able to get more samples through columning in one day than most people did in two. And my batches never failed (there are standards in chemisty that must be met in every batch for the results to be considered valid, if they are not met the samples must be reprocessed from scratch). Because of this I never got to move on from columning, despite constant promises that I was going to train in Instruments (the department where you do the final analysis), and Coding (where you do interpret the data) next. When it came down to it every morning I would be met with, "Sorry Sarah, but we're really slammed in Columning today, we need you there. You can start in Instruments next week." I was bored out of my mind by the end.

 

I gave a lot of thought as to whether I wanted to spend my entire career at this company, or in this field at all. I had never planned on a career in chemistry, I had always seen it as a stepping stone, a foundation of knowledge that I could build on. So I made the decision to quit my job at Axys to forge a different path. I sold all my stuff, bought a train pass, and travelled around North America for the next seven months. I got bit by the travel bug the first time I went to Europe when I was eight years old, and had always dreamed of travelling around the World. I've travelled on four continents now, and am determined to get to all of them before I'm done. I learned a lot about myself while travelling alone for all those months. Primarily I learned that I could still do most of my favourite things with nothing but my laptop. I had loaded it up with movies and books and games before I left. I did see tons of stuff and met lots of interesting people during my travels, but I think I spent the majority of my time staring at this screen, the one I bought specifically for its drawing capabilities. I spent a lot of time learning Adobe Illustrator and while I was on the train I made about a dozen comic strips with it about an alien learning about humans by hacking into the Internet. (Click here if you want to check them out.) I also drew a bunch of the things I saw, especially towards the end of the trip, when I bought a car and drove up to Yellowknife to see where my sister was living. I later found a program called Inkscape, which is a similar illustration program that I fell in love with and still use regularly to this day for everything from drawing circuit diagrams to making the art and animations for a browser based video game I'm experimenting with.

 

Once my money starting running out I was forced to make some decisions about what I wanted to do for work. I moved back to Victoria because even after seeing some amazing parts of the world I still think this is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and there is a pretty awesome nerd culture here that makes me feel at home. I did some research on the current economy and job market, and thought that becoming an electrician would suit me; it's the best paying trade, is in high demand, and I loved the basic circuits course I took at Seneca. I talked to someone at the Electrician's Union here in Victoria and learned that they only accept members who have taken the pre-apprenticeship program at Camosun. So I applied, only to find out that they had a wait-list of a year and a half. I didn't want to go back to Axys to wait it out because that felt like a step backwards, so I read pretty much every program description that Camosun offers to see if there was something else that I might like to do instead.

 

Electronics and Computer Engineering Technology - Renewable Energy: it's a mouthful, but has courses in everything I'd been curious about but didn't know how to learn on my own. First of all, inorganic chemistry and flowing electrons was always my favourite part of chemistry school, and electronics engineering is essentially an application of that. Also, I really wanted to be able to understand what all those little things that were soldered on circuit boards did, and I was excited by the idea of learning to code because of all the creative possibilities that would open up. This program is a perfect combination of sitting at my laptop typing and drawing, and working with my hands building and testing circuits on breadboards. I'm looking for a career that has a similar balance, where I can keep growing and learning, and where I can be useful and proud of what I do. If you know someone who is looking for someone like me, please consider sending them a link to this site.