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.

"The idea was to educate people who were children of immigrants, a lot of immigrantsfrom 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,Meehansaid 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 asthe college's distinguished alumni for 2017.

Regina's own Natasha Jaques received the award on Saturday. Jaquesmade her way home from Boston, where she's completing her PhD in computer science at the prestigiousMassachusetts Institute of Technology.

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"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.

Jaqueswas deeply involved with a project called GIRLsmartsat 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 toJaques.

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"What I'd like to believe, and what Idid initially, was that James Damoreis an outlier. That his opinions 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,Jaquessaid shestill feels the biggest reason for the discrepancy is the culture surrounding the industry, which is why she continues to work to change it.