“There wasn’t really a market for it but then, I became a teacher anyway.”
Jenan Abderrahman is a Telemetry Engineer in Electrical, Controls and Energy Systems at Enbridge. Jenan joined the Perfectly Unfiltered podcast to share her career path story, tips and tricks for excelling in Engineering, and how to connect with the community.
What is Telemetry Engineering?
Telemetry Engineering is the use of measurement data to communicate with remote locations. Jenan’s role at Enbridge is to secure communication between the Enbridge systems processing and the power supply devices.
What should I do after high school?
In high school, Jenan wanted to be a physics and math teacher but the market for teachers was saturated. That’s when Jenan got advice from a teacher that would change her life, “He was honest with me…. He said, ‘You like math and physics, you want to go to college to be a math and physics teacher… why not try engineering? If you get out and still want to be a teacher, you can do the one-year teachers’ college.” Jenan took that advice and found her passion in engineering while attending Ryerson University.
Is engineering hard?
Jenan admits that the hardest part in the process was the degree tself, “The concepts you need to excel in, it’s a lot of concepts, a lot of challenging material, in a very short time. It was very grueling.”
She outlines three key nuggets that helped her get through the process:
Support: having a good support system makes all the difference.
Mindset: Jenan admits it can be hard to stay positive, “Sometimes people had to remind me.”
Be open to opportunities: “People like you and me like to be in control, but sometimes it’s realizing its okay to take risks.”
Career passion and personal satisfaction
Although Jenan never went back to teacher’s college, she did follow in her passion to teach and volunteer with youth, teaching children about robotics. She’s also volunteered as a facilitator in youth programming and collaborated on diversity and inclusion initiatives.
As a woman of color in STEM, Jenan is no stranger to the obstacles women face in male-dominated fields. How does she navigate it? What is she doing to give back? What has Reality Television taught her? Listen to Episode 19 of the Perfectly Unfiltered podcast and find out!
