Regina's Campion College celebrates 100th anniversary
Regina's Campion College is celebrating a century of bringing academia and higher learning to the city and province.
Initially led by Jesuits, the college started out as a Catholic boys school, offering education in French and English. John Meehan, the president of Campion College, said the college has its roots in brining education to the to the people who needed it most.
"The idea was to educate people who were children of immigrants, a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe, a lot of them were from poorer backgrounds and most of them were from families that didn't have much education," said Meehan.
That aspect of the college's history carried on through the years, according to Meehan. During the Great Depression, Saskatchewan was hit hard, but for families wanting to send their boys to school there were alternative payment methods — like grain.
"A lot of parents couldn't afford the tuition," he said. "So we have accounts of people paying their tuition in the form of grain or livestock."
Jumping ahead to the present day, Meehan said there is often the perception that a liberal-arts degree might not be worth it.
"Our answer is, we've been forming leaders for generations. Our graduates from liberal arts are out there doing exciting things," said Meehan.
From humble beginnings to new technology
One such alumni is indeed doing exciting things and was honoured as the college's distinguished alumni for 2017.
Regina's own Natasha Jaques received the award on Saturday. Jaques made her way home from Boston, where she's completing her PhD in computer science at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It's a huge honour, I'm so flattered that they would think of me and I just hope that it means that what I'm doing is potentially having some impact," said Jaques.
Jaques was deeply involved with a project called GIRLsmarts at the University of British Columbia. The idea behind the project was to expose girls to technology and activities that encourage and interest in S.T.E.M. fields. Coding, building robots and working with circuits were all part of the camp.
"If we show younger girls that robots are fun, programming is fun, all of these things are really interesting pursuits then I think we could make a big diference," said Jaques.
Having interned at Google, the recent controversial manifesto published by an ex-Google employee was disheartening to Jaques.
"What I'd like to believe, and what I did initially, was that James Damore is an outlier. That his opinion don't represent very many people in the tech world," she said. Unfortunately she found that to be untrue.
"There are more people than you would expect that genuinely believe that diversity initiatives are not important, that there are some inherent differences causing the gap."
Despite this, Jaques said she still feels the biggest reason for the discrepancy is the culture surrounding the industry, which is why she continues to work to change it.
