By Melissa Nilan, Marketing and Communications
Photo by David Denofreo

Gurmaan Brar wants to be at the forefront of creating technology that changes our lives à la Apple and SpaceX. To achieve his goal, he’s pursuing a degree in engineering at the University of Victoria (UVic). But he chose the Douglas College Engineering and Fabrication Technologies Diploma as his first step.

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Gurmaan’s future wasn’t always so bright. He got kicked out of high school, and had to work hard to catch up and get the grades to apply to post-secondary. But the experience left him unsure about continuing his education. He toyed with the idea of taking a year off, but ultimately, concerns about losing momentum changed his mind; he made a last-minute decision to apply Douglas.

It was a sound decision that gave him a solid foundation for his education.

“Douglas gave me a great background in math and physics, which has made my classes at UVic easy. Plus the hands-on experience in the fabrication labs gave me a better understanding of how things work. I made a planetary gear set, an electronic remote to power a Lego train we built, and headphone amplifiers that I reused in my car to boost the stereo bass. That’s not something I would have gotten if I’d gone straight to a university program,” says Gurmaan.

Gurmaan says he loved Douglas’s community feel and the small classes; his classmates were always looking out for each other. The team environment was one of the things that drew him to engineering in the first place.

“Engineering is a team-based profession,” says Gurmaan. “You need to be creative and good at problem-solving, but more importantly, you need to be able to connect with other people and communicate well.”

Read more: Douglas student follows his heart to university and his own business

After he graduated from Douglas, Gurmaan took advantage of the transfer agreement that offers Douglas Engineering students a guaranteed seat in the second year of UVic’s bachelor program. Once he graduates from UVic, the sky’s the limit.

 “I want to be involved in a big engineering project that has a huge impact – like the iPhone or Falcon rockets. Something that changes people’s reality.”