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INUVIK
When students representing the NWT travelled from Inuvik to Charlottetown to represent the territory in the Canada-Wide Science Fair earlier this month, they were looking forward to the experience but were not necessarily hoping to win.

Deanna Sonneveld, left, Mikaela Cockney-MacNeil, teacher Zahra Kimji, Hailey Verbonac and education assistant Kenzie MacDonald show off their swag from the 2012 Canada-Wide Science Fair held in Charlottetown, P.E.I., from May 12 to 19. - Laura Busch/NNSL photo

"I was sitting there, and they called my name, and Kenzie had to kind of shake me and tell me I won," said Mikaela Cockney-MacNeil who brought home a bronze medal from the event.

"I felt very confused for a little while, and then walking through the aisle it all of a sudden hit me that ... that was a very big feat for me."

In a crowd of about 500 participants, Cockney-MacNeil's medal was in the intermediate excellence awards category at the event.

Psychological experiment

The Grade 10 student's national-award-winning project focused on a psychological study she conducted to see if certain types of people were more likely to second-guess themselves under pressure.

The project, titled 'Are you sure?' may have caught the attention of the judges at the fair, but for Cockney-MacNeil the real prize is getting the exposure to people and ideas that can be hard to come by in Inuvik.

Cockney-MacNeil says that she already knows that she wants to pursue a career in experimental psychology, but there aren't a lot of resources here for her to follow her passion.

As a result of the event, Cockney-MacNeil has kept in contact with one of the judges, said teacher Zahra Kimji.

"The kids can take the opportunity to contact (the judges) and start networking and perhaps mentoring for the future," she said.

This kind of contact would be hard to make without being able to travel to larger events, said Cockney-MacNeil, "because we live in Inuvik and they're hard to come by."

Deanna Sonneveld, who also competed in the science fair with a project on how dogs see colour, agreed. She is interested in becoming a veterinarian, but it's hard to learn about the profession in a town with no vet, she said.

"It's almost impossible to get a mentor here because we're so isolated," said Sonneveld.

Getting students access to more information about the subjects they are interested in – especially the less popular or more technical subjects – is a challenge that Kimji hopes to work on in the future. Getting students access to academic journals and other information they might otherwise not have a chance to see before university can help give them a head start, she said.

"Living here, you don't always meet people who are interested in the things that you're interested in," said Cockney-MacNeil, adding she got a lot out of looking at other students' projects in the health sciences.

"They were so interesting to me," she said. "And talking to them was like talking to someone much like myself."

Beyond participating in the science fair, the group took in many of the sights of Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island and enjoyed soaking up East Coast culture.

"What really stuck out to me was just the friendliness of everyone," said Sonneveld.

For this year's participants, the experience was like no other, and Cockney-MacNeil said she would encourage any NWT student who is interested in the sciences to enter next year.

"Work hard, because it is so worth it," she said.

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