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Summer student profile: Musa Aziz-Bhatti keeps the water running

Everyone in Yellowknife depends on the city’s water system. To keep the pipes flowing, the city depends on reliable maintenance workers and reliable data on line breaks.
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Musa Aziz-Bhatti, right, says the field work involved in his role is a welcome change from the two years of online schooling. Photo courtesy of Musa Aziz-Bhatti

Everyone in Yellowknife depends on the city’s water system. To keep the pipes flowing, the city depends on reliable maintenance workers and reliable data on line breaks.

That’s where Musa Aziz-Bhatti comes in. Aziz-Bhatti is pursuing Environmental Studies at York University with a specialization in Environmental Management. As a summer student in Yellowknife, Aziz-Bhatti works as an administrative assistant with the Department of Corporate Services. His role includes both office work, collecting and organizing data, and field work, conducting maintenance on city facilities.

His biggest project so far has been cleaning up the city’s data on water line breaks. “Over the past 10 years or so, data collection has been pretty fragmented,” he says. “And it’s hard to keep up with and hard to identify where breaks have happened and which areas they’ve happened in. So one of the jobs I’ve been working on for the past few weeks was cleaning up the data.”

Aziz-Bhatti reviewed 700 water line repair jobs and organized them into a better and more standardized system. He and his boss proposed the new system which was quickly adopted.

“It required a range of different skills,” he says. “But that’s what a typical day consisted of, collecting data and using it for a valuable cause.”

Aziz-Bhatti says the field work has been a refreshing break from the past two years of online schooling and Zoom classes. “I feel like working at the city, getting a lot of exposure to field work and stuff that translates over to what I’m learning, which is nice.”

Aziz-Bhatti says the environment at the City of Yellowknife has been particularly welcoming. “The workplace environment is super friendly,” he says. “I feel like working here has helped me grow as an individual, given the things I’m learning and the people I work with are very determined to do their best, which kind of rubs off on me.”

Aziz-Bhatti’s not alone either. There are about as many summer students at the City of Yellowknife this year as there were a year ago. Last year 54 students were hired. This year, more than 55 have been hired according to City spokesperson Sarah Sibley.

Aziz-Bhatti says when he speaks with his York University colleagues interning in places like Toronto, they’re all eager to learn about Yellowknife, and how they might land a position in the city too, “which is pretty interesting to see. People from Toronto, they don’t have a clue about what Yellowknife is and what it has to offer, but they seem very interested in finding a way up here, I guess.”

For Aziz-Bhatti, his current position is about making a difference while doing what he’s passionate about: “I lived in Yellowknife before going to university and I think I want to make a change, a positive change for the environment,” he says.