Inspirational Person: Marilyn Spink, Engineering Advocate

Marilyn Spink has spent her 30-year career in Engineering (working on projects in mining, pulp and paper industries, steelmaking operations, and consulting engineering). She has led and supported teams of professional engineers and designers to complete projects around the world. She is a licensed professional engineer and a member of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE). In 2014, she was appointed by Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor to Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) and is currently Vice President Appointed. Spink is married to Jamie Gerson, also a professional engineer, who is extremely supportive of all her interests and a wonderful father to their three children.

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What has been one of the most rewarding parts of your career?

Building stuff and helping people. It is rewarding to see your ideas become real and improve the lives of the people who use whatever you built, or grow from the advice you have provided to them. I am always learning, but the more I learn the more I realize don’t know. My learning is mostly about self-discovery these days. I need to speak less and listen more!

With only 11% of Professional Engineers in Ontario being women, what unique value do you think the female perspective brings to solving Engineering problems?

Women are socialized differently than men. The unique value women bring to solving Engineering problems is simply a different perspective – period. A bunch of similar people (age, race, gender, backgrounds) speaking & working with one another hinders

Spring 2015: Poetic Inspiration

 

An excerpt from Rupi Kaur’s recently published: ‘Milk and Honey‘

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You can find more artistic inspiration (poetic, visual and musical) here.

Everything is connected – our bodies, our world.

This absolutely powerful TED talk by Eve Ensler, touched me in a way I cannot explain. She shares her heart wrenching insights into the connection between our awareness of and compassion for our bodies and the body of our world.

Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection. I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world – and it wasn’t happening later, it was happening now. Suddenly my cancer was the cancer that was everywhere: the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live downstream from chemical plants (and they are usually poor), the cancer inside the coal miners lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women’s uterus from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.

In his new and visionary book, New Self, New World, the writer Philip Shepherd says, “If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world. Which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong.”

Before cancer, the world was something ‘other’. It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool, and cancer dynamited the boulder that separated me from the larger sea. Now I am swimming in it. Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet. Now I take a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush, and when it rains, hard rain, I scream and run in circles. I know that everything is connected.

 

I hope her pure passion resonates with you – like it did with me.

What struck you about her talk? Please share below!

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#LikeAGirl – Inspirational Women: a never ending list

I hope whatever you do, whatever you dream, you have the courage to do it #LikeAGirl:

• Run a country #LikeAGirl – Pratibha Patil (India), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Indira Gandhi (India), Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia), Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese (Ireland), Tarja Halonen and Mari Kiviniemi (Finland), Dalia Grybauskaite (Lithuania), Johanna Siguroardottir (Iceland), Jadranka Kosor (Croatia), Iveta Radicova (Slovakia), Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina), Laura Chinchilla Miranda (Costa Rica), Pearlette Louisy (St. Lucia), Kamla Persad-Bissessar (Trinidad and Tobago), Roza Otunbayeva (Kyrgyzstan), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Sheikh Hasina (Bangladesh), Julia Gillard (Australia)
• Win the game #LikeAGirl – Florence Griffith-Joyner (fastest woman of all time), Serena Williams (only tennis player to hold all four Grand Slam titles at the same time), Tracy Caulkins (set five world swimming records and 63 U.S. records), Bonnie Blair (5 olympic gold medals in speed skating). Mia Hamm (scored more goals in her career than any other player, male or female, from the U.S, and named FIFA player of the year twice), Ellen MacArthur (broke the non-stop solo sailing world record), Tanni Grey-Thompson  (outstanding paralympian), Jackie Joyner-Kersee (one of the best athletes of all time)
• Lead a company #LikeAGirl – Indra Nooyi (CEO of PepsiCo, the second largest food and beverage business in the world), Mary Barra (CEO of General Motors), Margaret Cushing Whitman (CEO of  Hewlett-Packard)
• Be brave #LikeAGirl – Malala Yousafzai (17 year old education activist in Pakistan), Emmeline Pankhurst(women’s right to vote, UK), Roza Parks (African american civil rights activist)
• Explore the world #LikeAGirl – Amelia Earhart (aviation pioneer), Jane Goodall (world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees), Marie Curie (pioneering research on radioactivity, two-time Nobel Prize winner)
• Save lives #LikeAGirl – Florence Nightingale (founder of modern nursing), Mother Teresa
• Build an Empire #LikeAGirl – Oprah Winfrey (arguably one of the most influential people on earth).

 

The next time you use the saying ‘#LikeAGirl’, may it be an expression of strength and downright awesomeness! Help me to keep this list growing, by adding women who inspire you in the comments below.

 

 

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