When a deadly assault on young women unfolded 29 years ago at École Polytechnique in Montreal, Karina McInnis was an engineering student in a lecture hall at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. She was terrified.
"I remember thinking that if someone came in behind us with a machine gun, we would all be stuck in there, defenceless," said McInnis, a professional engineer who joined the University of Guelph as associate vice-president (research services) this year. "There was no way out. It was a terrible feeling."
Prof. Mary Wells was in the early stages of her career in engineering, living in Hamilton, Ont., when the massacre happened on Dec. 6, 1989.
"I remember that day very distinctly," said Wells, now dean of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. "It's one of those moments in time when your emotions are so strong that the details are embedded in your memory forever."
Prof. Soha Moussa heard early reports of the Montreal massacre while preparing to return home to Canada from Egypt as a recent engineering graduate of the American University in Cairo.
"Before we travelled, this was all over the news, all around the world," Moussa said. "And my husband said, Tell me why I would want to take you back there?' I was a female engineer, about to start a master's degree in a francophone university in Canada. It was frightening."
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