Adam Viscount

I never thought I’d be doing this when I was in high school. When I was young, I wanted to be an orthodontist (I had to go to one as a kid and he had a cool office). I liked science and math as well as business (I took an entrepreneurship course that I really liked). My parents are both accountants and I thought I would do that. I went to university and enrolled in a business program, but I didn’t like it. I was just not interested in what we were doing.

I started to rethink my plans. I wanted to do something that would bring science and math together because I liked both of those subjects. I spoke with two of my uncles who were engineers. They told me about how they used math and science in their work. Before this, I didn’t think much about pursuing engineering, however the more I learned about engineering, the more I wanted to become one. I made the decision to switch from a business degree to engineering. That was a bit scary because it seemed to me that I had wasted a full year (not to mention tuition fees!). And I would be almost two years older than the rest of the people in my program. But from the first semester I knew this was where I wanted to be. 

And this was a time when the oil and gas industry was starting to boom in NL. My B.Eng. program was a co-op program, so I had six work terms. Each term was in a slightly different part of the industry. Some were with local companies while another was in Houston, Texas and another was in Scotland (but none with ExxonMobil). This gave me a great overview of the entire oil and gas industry. So, by the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to work in this industry. But I never thought I’d get the chance to work in my home province and in the city where I grew up. I always felt I’d have to go away to get work. I feel very fortunate that I was able to get a job with ExxonMobil and to build a life here.