Engineering Science Alumni Profile

February Alumni Profile: Miss Kristen Facciol (Aerospace 0T9)

Kristen Facciol, a recent graduate of Engineering Science’s Aerospace Option, talks to us about how a childhood experience, the Option choices in Engineering Science and opportunities for extracurricular involvement helped her follow her dream of working in space robotics.

Profile by Erin Macnab

With an encouraging algebra teacher and two high school teachers as parents, Kristen Facciol always knew that engineering was an excellent career path for students who, like herself, were academically strong, dedicated to and interested in math, science and technology. Engineering Science was a good choice for Kristen, who knew she wanted to take engineering but wasn’t one hundred percent sure which discipline was for her. EngSci gave her the chance to make a considered decision after being exposed to each discipline. The EngSci atmosphere both challenged and enriched Kristen’s experience: “First year was not at all what I was expecting! I think it was the diversity of the material that made it difficult for me and not so much the content itself. It was quite stressful, but a very valuable learning experience. Once I adjusted to the new environment, it was a lot easier to deal with.”

After working through the foundational courses of first and second year Engineering Science, two Options stood out to Kristen: Biomedical and Aerospace. In trying to decide between the two, Kristen thought both about their respective curriculums – which one had the courses that interested her most? – and also about what she could be doing with her degree after. These considerations led Kristen to choose Aerospace: “I went to space camp around the age of twelve and got to be part of a simulated mission doing the Hubble Telescope repair. That was when I first learned about the Canadarm. From this point forwards, I had an interest in space robotics. It was robotics specifically that attracted my attention [to Aerospace], and since I knew I wasn’t going into space, I figured the next best thing would be to send them there. Not to mention the fact that I’d be able to call myself a rocket scientist after I was done!”

Despite the stress of adjusting to the EngSci curriculum and choosing an Option, Kristen, like many Engineering Science students, didn’t spend all her time studying. She helped out at recruitment events, participated in Engineering Science’s Leaders of Tomorrow group, and was a F!rosh leader. However, her major extracurricular involvements came with the U of T Space Design Contest and Skule Nite: “The U of T Space Design Contest was a really great opportunity to introduce high school students to the discipline. I was able to share my passions and interests with them and perform somewhat of a mentoring role while organizing or running the event, to different extents each year. It really helped further my interests in the industry and put a fun twist on what I was doing in school.”

Skule Nite, the annual UofT Engineering musical and comedy revue was, in Kristen’s words, “exhausting, overwhelming and sometimes frustrating, but I could never trade it for anything in the world.” Like many EngScis, Kristen has fostered a lifetime passion for music, and her outgoing personality attracted her to the performance and comedy aspect of Skule Nite, in which she participated in her third year: “Being in a musical is something I have always aspired to do, and do hope to do again someday, and a musical sketch comedy revue?! Even better! Yes, a lot of my time was dedicated to this, but you have to make time for the things you love – and this happened to be it.”

Alongside all this extracurricular involvement, Kristen pursued her childhood interest in space robotics. The Space Systems Design course, a core requirement of the Aerospace curriculum, was the catalyst for getting her current position with MDA Space Missions, who ran the course that year. Throughout her time in EngSci, Kristen learned more and more about the projects that the company was and is involved in, and she capitalized on her networking skills alongside the opportunity offered by the course: “I loved the course and made some valuable connections that I sincerely believe helped me get the job.”

Since starting with MDA two and a half years ago, Kristen has been working on the next stage of the project that first grabbed her interest and fostered her dream of a career in space robotics: “I have been a part of the Systems Engineering team that is working on the Next Generation Canadarm (NGC) project for the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). I was fortunate enough to start on the project shortly after the proposal was submitted and will remain a part of the team that sees it through to completion this year.”

Kristen’s position at MDA allows her to work with many groups on a variety of tasks: “I work on everything from requirement development and traceability through to software development and hardware testing. Having the opportunity to work on a program of this nature and see it through from beginning to end has been an incredibly valuable experience and has introduced me to several disciplines through the systems group. I had the opportunity to work in human factors to design a graphical user interface, put together interface control documents for mechanical, data and electrical interfaces throughout the system, as well as work directly with the developed hardware to perform system testing. Now, in the final phases of the project, I have been largely involved in the integrated system testing.”

Kristen’s story shows that extracurricular involvement, networking skills and most of all, pursuing what you love, are all part of the puzzle of finding your career path after graduating from Engineering Science. As Kristen says, “Really consider what you’re interested in pursuing post-graduation. Talk to people in the different options to hear about their experiences and what they have and haven’t liked – you can’t get this information from reading course descriptions. Most of all, do what makes you happy!”


Check out the Next Generation Canadarm project at the Canadian Space Agency’s site: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/canadarm/ngc.asp

Do you know an EngSci alumna/alumnus who would make a great profile subject? Recommend someone!






January Alumni Profile: Dr. Zoe Szajnfarber (Aerospace 0T5+PEY)

Dr. Zoe Szajnfarber talks to the Division of Engineering Science about her path to graduate school and her current research as an Assistant Professor at The George Washington University (Washington, D.C.).

Profile by Erin Macnab

Like many Engineering Science students, Zoe Szajnfarber came into her first year with strong academic skills, but without a clear idea of what career path she wanted to pursue. The challenge offered by Engineering Science, paired with the opportunity to choose from diverse majors in third year appealed to Zoe. When it came time to choose her Option, Zoe still felt indecisive. It was then she received and decided to follow the classic advice, “Do what you enjoy and the rest will follow.”

As Zoe says, “So I picked Aerospace. Not because I was sure that it was my calling; or because it necessarily had the best career prospects; but because robots seemed cool and the ones that went into space were the coolest of all. I’ve never regretted that decision.”

It was her Professional Experience Year that guided Zoe to her current path. She worked at MDA Space Missions (then MDRobotics) in Brampton, best known for the development of the Canadarm. Like many PEY students, Zoe’s plan was, as she describes, “to prove myself to them and secure a post-graduation job doing what I loved – space robotics.”

However, that year completely changed Zoe’s perspective on what it means to be an engineer and what she wanted from a career:

“I had the fortune and misfortune to work on the post-Columbia return to flight certification verification. It exposed me to a wide range of technical engineering areas, but also to the complexity of the bureaucratic decision making process and its interaction with engineering assessments. I discovered that for all that I was good at math and engineering, I was never going to be the very best. My comparative advantage was in integrating, and finding patterns across, socio-technical domains and communicating those insights to decision makers.”

Through her PEY experience, Zoe discovered her passions lay not necessarily in traditional engineering, but in figuring out how organizations work, and making sure that good ideas and good policy survive and thrive. Upon graduating from EngSci, she commenced a dual master’s program at MIT in Aeronautics & Astronautics and Technology and Policy. This combination allowed her to continue studying aerospace engineering while using coursework and research in political economy, law and policy to supplement and develop her interest in technology management and policy.

When it came time to focus on a PhD topic, Zoe chose an area at the intersection of engineering and management. Her dissertation work sought to explain how innovation can, and should, be encouraged in technology intensive sectors with heavy government involvement:

"My current research context is NASA's science directorate. I have been studying the innovation pathways taken by a selection of new technologies developed and implemented within NASAs science directorate. We define an innovation pathway as the sequence of events, actions and decisions that mature a new technology from initial conception to implementation on a flight system. By interviewing key participants about their decisions and motivations, and reviewing proposals and publications to establish a real-time snapshot of the technical evolution, I have been able to construct a bottom-up view of how the real organization works, and is managed. The process model that has emerged yields some interesting and counterintuitive insights about the relationship between strategic-level changes and their impact on the micro behaviors of individuals within the system, and consequently the technology that they developed. These insights provide both an empirical basis for refining some of the existing innovation theory as well as having direct implications for key contemporary space policy debates. In fact, they have been communicated (on an invitational basis) to decision-makers at NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency), CSA and the US DoD; this has been both a great outlet for our research results, while also providing an opportunity to experience space policy in practice."

Zoe was hired as an Assistant Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at The George Washington University in 2011 after completing her PhD. She also has an appointment as a Research Affiliate in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. Her research group at GWU continues to work in the area of innovation in Large-Scale Complex Engineered Systems. “Szajnlab” graduate students are attaching the problem from multiple perspectives: working on new theory about how market structure and product complexity change the fundamental dynamics of innovation; developing a broader empirical understanding of the phenomenon; building models of the observed process. The team is working towards the goal of developing what Zoe calls an “’R&D management flight simulator’ that will allow senior decision makers to test the impact of different styles of intervention, be it investment, organizational design or cultural changes.”

Guided by formative experiences in the Aerospace Option of Engineering Science, and her PEY at MDA, Zoe Szajnfarber lives up to EngSci’s slogan – Engineers for the World. Through her fascinating interdisciplinary work, Zoe is forging a career that bridges technical engineering with innovative policy research. Her story exemplifies one of the many exciting, unique paths that Engineering Science students have pursued after graduating from the program.

To read more about Dr. Szajnfarber’s current research and check out the work her lab is doing, go to: http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~zszajnfa/

Additional quotes from interview with the Canadian Space Agency