in focus

Dear Fellow Members and Friends of MetSoc:

  Joel Kapusta (left),   MetSoc President and Editor, Air Liquide
  Alejandro Bustos, Air Liquide Colleague and Mentor
 

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are words I carefully select to convey my message. They have a special meaning to me. Nurturing applied to my own career path and describes the mentorship I received during my schooling years and on the job in the "real" world. As a keen junior professional starting with Air Liquide in 1995, I was fortunate to cross paths with Dr. Alejandro Bustos, an injection technology expert respected in both the extractive metallurgy community and within Air Liquide. Learning on the job with a mentor such as Alejandro, pictured above, was pivotal in my career. Alejandro nurtured my interest and keenness in pyrometallurgy into an expertise and a career of my own. Having experienced and benefited from mentorship, the time has come for me to give back... and through what better channel than MetSoc! This is what motivates me to steer MetSoc to develop the means and tools to attract students and junior professionals to our Society and to nurture them into becoming future leaders of our profession. MetSoc's commitment has already been demonstrated: a Task Force has been set up by our Board of Directors to review our student programs and explore through dialog with you, our members, the options to revamp or strengthen them, or to create new programs altogether. This is where persuading comes in! The onus is on us to ensure MetSoc's student programs are relevant so that students, whether Metallurgical or Materials, will choose MetSoc as their professional home.

I am committed too! I will be attending the CMSC 2008 in Edmonton organized by Professor Reg Eadie and his team from the University of Alberta. This will be my first CMSC and I look forward to meeting this year's student delegates and hearing their views first hand. One of the key questions of many a student is "where are the jobs when I graduate?" In conjunction with the Organizing Committee of COM 2008, to be held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, August 24-27, a special effort will be put into the Industry-Student Mixer to make sure industry representatives and student delegates do get the opportunity to mix in a casual atmosphere. Stay tuned for more details in the near future!

Joel Kapusta
President and Editor
Air Liquide
jkapusta@cim.org