BY GIANNI UBRIACO
You can achieve anything you want in life if you just believe, work hard, and follow you dreams. That’s something to which 25-year-old Sudbury resident, Raymond Francis, can definitely attest.
The graduate of the mechanical and engineering program at the University of Ottawa is now packing his bags as he gets set to move in a week and a half to Noordwijk in the Netherlands to start his new job as a developer of microgravity payloads at the European Space Agency (ESA).
“In the European industry, there are a lot of proposals for various scientific experiments or things that they want to test in low gravity conditions, like space,” he explains. “ESA sorts through those and then they need a team of engineers and scientists to figure out how to make it work in zero gravity. So basically, I’ll be developing scientific experiments for them.”
The graduate of St. Benedict’s High School was one of about 1,500 applicants for the one-year employment program. Every year, the ESA chooses between 50-60 people from about 25 countries to take part, so Francis realizes how big of an opportunity this is for him.
“I knew it was kind of a long shot because they usually don’t take more than a handful of Canadians every year,” he says. “It’s usually a program that they give to those with masters degrees. So, that combined with the fact that I’m not from a member country of the space agency, there were a lot of hills to climb, but once I got the interview, I knew I had a chance.”
He originally applied for the position last summer and was interviewed by phone interview before he was invited for a one-on-one interview.
He didn’t find out that he was chosen until the end of April, but immediately learned a valuable lesson.
“I think a lot of people expect that you can’t do that kind of thing from here, but you can,” he says. “The message really is to figure out what it is that you want to do. You’ll probably have to work hard, especially if it’s something like this, and you’re going to have to get an education and look for opportunities for experience, but it’s worth it.”
Once he’s done his work at the ESA, he plans on completing his masters of space science at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. The two-year program involves one year of course work and a year of work at a space flight lab in Toronto, where they design and launch small satellites.
After that, he hopes to continue working for the ESA or possibly the Canadian Space Agency.
“You can have a dream and if you stick with it, you might get it,” he tells everyone. “If you don’t, you won’t and you’ll end up wherever you drift to.
If you’re on a lake in a canoe, you can either paddle to wherever you want to go or you can drift to wherever the wind pushes you. Those are your choices, so start paddling.”
