Autumn Bernard is member of Cochrane High School’s 2015 graduating class, but unlike the rest of her fellow graduates, she’s earned top accolades in five subjects and has received three scholarships and bursaries.
Most students would be happy with that, and Autumn is, but she’s got her sights set sky high. The promising graduate wants to eventually become an air crash investigator.
Around Grade 10 was when her interest piqued, after watching Discovery Channel’s flight disaster show Mayday.
The show recreates plane crashes and delves into their investigations, which ignited an interesting in solving these incidents.
“It’s putting a puzzle together without instructions,” Bernard said. “Seeing just how much goes into an airplane crash and knowing that when you solve it you can help families cope with it if they’ve lost someone.”
What has the high school experience provided Bernard? “Definitely the math,” she said with a laugh. Group projects and learning how to work with people collectively were other skills she cited.
Her mother Rhonda couldn’t be prouder. “We’re amazed. She has always been determined and motivated; basically an inspiration to all of us.”
Her mom said that Autumn has always been interested by sciences; subjects she’s excelled at since kindergarten.
And her passion has continued to grow. Autumn took part in last year’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) jamboree in Boston as a member of the high school’s team CoBRA. Their project, which targeted a certain harmful fungus produced when pine beetles attack a tree, won best presentation. Her position was in the “wet lab,” where her and the team genetically engineered a strain of the E. coli bacteria to produce a protein that would break down the outer wall of the blue stain fungus, thus making it less damaging to the tree and lessening the impact of the beetle.
Autumn is a bit of outlier. An April article for Maclean’s magazine said national enrolment for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is 19 per cent on average and just 12 per cent of the country’s 280,000 professional engineers are women.
However, Autumn said she’s not out to prove a point.
“When people bring that up, it’s like ‘here I am to prove them wrong.’ It doesn’t really bother me that people think it’s male dominated.”
She’ll head to Carleton University in Ottawa this fall entering the aerospace engineering program.
