Alumnus takes hands-on learning to heart
From an early age, Sami Girgis couldn’t wait to find out how something worked. “As a child, taking things apart and putting them back together — if I still could — was one of my main hobbies,” he recalls.
That mechanical inclination eventually led him to choose Concordia where he earned a bachelor of engineering. “From all of the things I had heard about Concordia, I knew it was more of a hands-on engineering program,” he says. “That was really the path that led me here.”
That same path would guide him toward a career in industry that has now spanned more than two decades. By the end of his second year at Concordia, Girgis had started working closely with a few professors who had solid connections within the aerospace industry, particularly with Pratt & Whitney Canada (PWC). “This was back in 1987,” he recalls, “when there weren’t many means through which students could get internships in industry.”
With the help of his professors, Girgis managed to get a summer internship with PWC’s turbine aerodynamics group. He landed in the same department when he graduated two years later. “It was wonderful to come back,” he says. “Everyone I had met was still there; the team was still there.” A decade later, he would manage the very same department. “I really started in the basement and worked my way up within the group,” he says with a laugh.
Before his career in management took off, Girgis returned to Concordia in pursuit of additional skills that he could apply in a hands-on setting. “By 1992, I was starting to think about whether I would do a master’s or PhD in engineering, or branch out to cover the business side,” he explains. “So I started the MBA program at Concordia. I took a course here, a course there, and by 1998, I finished it. That same year, I became a manager within the company and found myself much better equipped to handle the challenges.”
As he assumed more responsibilities with the company, he was able to reconnect with some of his former Concordia professors and develop special projects with them.
“Professors at Concordia really stay very much cutting-edge on the applied side, as well as the academic side,” he says. This synergy motivated him to become part of the Faculty’s Industrial Advisory Council, an administrative body that helps to further the faculty’s relationships with industry.
Girgis enjoys his involvement. “It’s giving me a chance to give the company an even more formal voice in terms of helping to influence what the future curriculum is going to be, especially for aerospace,” he explains. “The world is changing so quickly that if we have the opportunity to give the faculty an early heads-up about changes that are coming that’s always a good thing.”
As Girgis reflects on the path that brought him to where he is today, he says it was clearly the faculty’s solid links to industry that led the way. “Professors in this Faculty know what the needs of the outside world are in terms of future graduates,” he says. “I think that’s probably one of the biggest strengths of Concordia’s Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science.”
He credits internship programs, such as the Concordia Institute of Aerospace Design and Innovation, and the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Co-op Program, for enabling employers like him to see students at work as potential colleagues.
“If we’ve had students with us through an internship, we already know whether they’re going to be a good fit because we’ve already seen them in action,” he says. “I’m one such example: the company’s management observed me for three months and wanted me back two years later.”
Girgis will return to his alma mater this winter to teach a course in gas turbine design — the very course he took as an undergraduate back in 1989. “It’s fun to come back and teach it after 20 years,” he says.
“It’s my way of paying back and bringing real-life experience into the classroom,” he says. “I like being able to say: this is the theory, but this is what really happens.”
Related Links:
• Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
• Concordia Institute of Aerospace Design and Innovation
• Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Co-op Program
• Pratt & Whitney Canada