Makenna Kuzyk, the first woman ever admitted to the International Test Pilots School, is the newest recipient of the scholarship that honours the 14 women killed at Polytechnique 35 years ago.
Makenna Kuzyk, a University of Alberta mechanical engineering grad who is pursuing her goal of becoming an astronaut, is the 10th recipient of the Order of the White Rose.
She was inducted into the sisterhood that honours the 14 women murdered at École Polytechnique on Dec. 6, 1989 at a ceremony Monday with survivors and past recipients.
Kuzyk is accustomed to thriving in traditionally male-dominated domains, be it on the basketball court or obtaining her blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
“Funny thing through flight training: In regulations still today, it will say ‘he.’ Like it’s always a ‘he’ when they’re referring to a person,” she recalled in an interview last week from the airport on her way to Montreal. “And I remember flying with my instructor and pilots, they talk to each other to try and locate where you are. And another pilot was like, ‘I can’t see him, where is he?’ And my flight instructor went on the radio and said, ‘It’s a girl — it’s a she.’ And when he said that, I felt really supported by my instructor. But it also made me reflect how very little female pilots there are, how little female astronauts there are. It’s something I definitely want to change.”
But more than the knowledge gleaned from the experiment, Kuzyk enjoyed the outreach, which included presenting some of their findings to a Grade 3 class.
“I learned a lot about how the impact isn’t just technical,” she said. “Even though we published in a magazine, which was really cool, the biggest accomplishment I felt was seeing the look on the kids’ faces
“I remember we went into a room, we did this presentation on space and then we asked them: ‘Who wants to be an astronaut?’ And every third-grader, every single kind, put up their hand. Seeing kids be inspired and knowing there are no limits to their passions was one of the greatest things about the team.”
Kuzyk intends to continue focusing on microgravity for her master’s thesis at the International Test Pilots School, a step on the path toward becoming an astronaut.
During her undergraduate studies, Kuzyk did an internship as a flight test engineer at the National Research Council flight research laboratory and another at the Canadian Space Agency in St-Hubert, where she worked out in the gym next to Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and spent her breaks in mission control, getting the latest updates from the International Space Station.
“Other than the job experience, which technically was amazing, career-wise it really opened my eyes that being an astronaut is making your own path. And for me, I want the future me to be not what everyone else is telling me to do, but what I make it for myself,” she said.
The Order of the White Rose was established on the 25th anniversary of the massacre that forever marked Montreal, as a living legacy for the shattered hopes and dreams of Geneviève Bergeron; Hélène Colgan; Nathalie Croteau; Barbara Daigneault; Anne-Marie Edward; Maud Haviernick; Barbara-Maria Klucznik-Widajewicz; Maryse Laganière; Maryse Leclair; Anne-Marie Lemay; Sonia Pelletier; Michèle Richard; Annie St-Arneault; and Annie Turcotte.
“I remember seeing their faces and reading their names and thinking harder about how they were my age and they lost their lives. They must have had so many big dreams. That was kind of the first time I thought about it on a deeper level,” she said. “I really want to do something bigger than myself in my life. And for me, that means helping space become accessible to everyone and allowing people to have those big dreams that are way past the sky, shooting for the stars, as far as they can, as I’m sure they were.”