From a moose meat farm in northern B.C. to building flying robots, Suzanne Nadon’s career has never been about learning her limits.

Sure, life tried to teach her some tough lessons — you can’t be a cub scout because you’re a girl, you can’t make good wages unless you have the right piece of paper, and you can’t put yourself through school as a single mom.

Nadon didn’t pay much attention to what others told her she could or couldn’t do. But the most important lesson learned by this natural entrepreneur was to never ignore opportunity.

This week, as the 39-year-old electronics engineering technology student joins more than 100 other DeVry Institute of Technology grads heading out into the world of business, she’s ready to create a few opportunities of her own.

DeVry officials call Nadon an ideal role model for women who want to study technology.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Suzanne Nadon helped build a helicopter-style robot for an international competition.

“There aren’t enough positive role models, so sometimes it’s difficult for students to see themselves not only succeeding through to graduation, but beyond,” says Christie Baker, co-chair of the W@VES (Women Advancing Equally to Success), a committee to promote integration and support of women in technology-related study and careers at DeVry.

Nadon, who as a youngster solved her Rubik’s cube by taking it apart with a screwdriver, has turned her love of tinkering into a new company, Cybotics Technology, which will manufacture working robots for both toys and industrial applications.

Nadon and her two partners plan to design their own robot kits — and perhaps even develop a unit which can detect and disarm buried mines from the air without risking human lives.

“I have an enormous amount of fun doing this,” admits Nadon, who put herself through three years of DeVry with a student loan and by working part-time at several jobs while raising her daughter, now 16.

“Personally, that’s my goal — in some small way, to make this world a better place.”

It hasn’t been an easy path. After leaving the family farm outside of Dawson Creek, B.C., after high school, Nadon enrolled in the marine biology program at University of Victoria. She lasted three months.

“You might as well be taking a correspondence course,” she snorts. “There were 400 people in my biology class and I probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize my professor on the street, let alone having any interaction with him (in class).

“I’m definitely a get-in-there-and-do-things kind of person, that’s the way I learn. Reading a book and teaching stuff to myself doesn’t do anything for me. I like the interactive atmosphere, the hands-on stuff.”

She toiled for a while as a graphic artist for a business magazine in Kelowna and a newspaper in Penticton, and then enrolled in the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

She completed the medical laboratory technician program, she recalls, “just as the bottom fell right out of the whole health-care system” and job prospects dried up.

After a stint as an office manager for a Kelowna golf course, she set her sights on Calgary and after a few months here, enrolled at DeVry.

Her experience at DeVry has been more enriching than simply attending classes and writing exams. She led a team in the International Aerial Robotics Competition, where students build helicopter-style robots which must fly and perform tasks autonomously.

She joined the DeVry student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a global organization which fosters technological innovation.

She worked, she raised her daughter, and she stayed involved – and all while maintaining a 3.8 grade point average. “If you apply yourself, you can always do it whenever you want. But applying yourself is the big thing,” says Nadon.

“If you’re just going to come here, take the courses, get by with the least you can do, don’t bother to come here. It won’t benefit you the way it should. Because this is a pretty expensive education, and you don’t undertake it lightly.”

Nadon says being one of the few females in the largely male-dominated technical institute — women make up about 26 per cent of students graduating this week — was never an issue for her, and W@VES co-ordinator Baker notes the institute has made big strides in changing the working environment for the benefit of all students.

An internal assessment just over a year ago showed DeVry faced some big challenges, including few female role models, too few scholarships available to adult women, and inappropriate, “high-school level” behaviour among some males.

In response, the institute gathered staff, faculty and students to establish the W@VES committee, which organized sensitivity training, developed connections with women-in-technology clubs in Calgary, and launched a number of other initiatives to make DeVry a more female-friendly place to learn.

“We want a positive environment where women feel comfortable, an environment that allows them to pursue technology-based education and careers without an intimidating culture,” says Baker.

“I believe we are seeing some changes.”

A graduate like Nadon “is actually a very good role model of what we’re trying to accomplish,” says Baker.

For her own part, Nadon believes other women interested in following a similar path to a technical career need to recognize their personal strengths and capitalize on them, “whatever they are, and regardless of what anybody else tells you.”

“A lot of people will tell you who you are, what you can be and what you can and can’t do,” she says. “But ultimately you know yourself better than anybody. And you should listen.”