It takes a curious mind to help drive continuous improvement – to look at our equipment and processes, seeking to understand them inside out, and to ask questions that lead us to discovery.

Gina Gosine leads our Process Team in Trinidad. She, along with her team, direct their curiosity at helping solve problems and exploring opportunities that can help drive production rates or improve safety.

We talked to her about her career at Methanex, the opportunities her career path has afforded her, and the vision that led to the creation of the first Ascend women’s Employee Resource Group.

How do you describe the work of a process engineer to someone who doesn’t know?

We work with the Operations team to understand the ins and outs of our site and combine that with data we collect and analyze from our process monitoring to improve plant efficiency, manage risk and enhance reliability and sustainability. Sometimes we work to solve a problem brought to us by the business, but we are usually searching for opportunities to make process improvements to do things like increase our production rates, reduce downtime and costs, or strengthen safety.

It’s a fascinating role, because part of the job is approaching the company’s day-to-day with a curious mind – getting to ask why and why not about what we do and how we do it, to see what we can uncover.

Whether I’m helping to solve a problem or uncovering something to improve our operations, it’s all very exciting and fulfilling work. It’s funny, though – I actually intended to be a lawyer while I was in school, but I ended up spending my entire career in engineering!

How does Law connect to process engineering?

It doesn’t at all!

When I was young, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I stuck with sciences as it helped keep my options open to different career fields. I really liked chemistry so chose to go into chemical engineering thinking there was chemistry, but it ended up being all math and physics! I actually didn’t like the course work at school as it was very theoretical, and I like to see how things work practically so it was difficult for me to relate.

I’d also always been interested in the law, but my parents sacrificed a lot to get me to university, so I wanted to complete my engineering studies first, and then go to law school. After graduating, because I was on scholarship, I needed to find a job a locally to pay it back to the government and I ended up as a Process Engineering Graduate Trainee at Massy Wood, which is a service provider for the energy sector. That program allowed me to rotate to Methanex, so I ended up working at our Trinidad plant site right out of school, though I also spent time with other clients while working at Massy.

I viewed the graduate work term with Massy as temporary, but while contracted to Methanex, I got to be part of the 2012 turnaround team, and I still vividly remember these moments standing on this massive site, with all these huge cranes, the hum of turnaround activity with all the contractors and employees, and the sunsets – these moments where everything fell into place and felt ‘right’ – where I felt like ‘I can do this for the rest of my life’. That’s when I realized that I like the practical part of process engineering – actually working with people and solving problems and being creative, though looking back I do see how important the theoretical learning of the basics and first principles was!

It also helped that I was getting exposed to different aspects of the field, as well as starting to understand the business enough to give back.

Working here, especially early on, helped me realize that process engineering can open me up to many possibilities – that it’s not engineering or, it’s engineering and, which is very exciting.

What’s an example of the and ?

Early in my career, I got an opportunity to work with the Corporate Development team in Vancouver for a few months. I supported a couple of pieces of work, but in particular, we conducted a benefits study to understand different technologies and their effect on both greenfield and brownfield projects, which is something I could contribute meaningfully to, given my background.

Another example was the RFP for air technologies from Air Liquide for G3. Experiences like that showed me how process engineering could connect to big contracts and be a valuable intermediary between the commercial side of business and the technical operational side. It was exciting to be exposed to different parts of the business and different ways of thinking. It helped reinforce this idea that in my role, I could add a lot of value by connecting numbers and models to real life. Plus, opportunities like this were a way to experience something different than my day-to-day.

A few years later, a temporary assignment opened on the commercial team, so I applied. I was part of the team supporting gas contract negotiations and developing the commercial strategy for moving to single-plant operations in Trinidad. I felt like I was bringing a lot to the role given my technical background, as well as the experiences I’d collected working with and touching so many different parts of the business. It was a fantastic experience to understand the bigger picture from a different perspective and connect things back to what we do every day as process engineers.

How do you apply these experiences in your day-to-day?

I think the biggest thing is just recognizing and acknowledging that it’s okay to not know and to not have the answers, so long as you do the work to find out and to grow. Early on, it’s easy to have imposter syndrome when you step out of your comfort zone and do something new, even if you can see the connection to your regular work.

I have felt that in every role, but especially as the process safety engineer. In that role, you influence at a leadership level, which can be challenging, and sometimes you start as the lone voice advocating for change. Further, the other process safety engineers and experts are located globally, so you don’t have a local coach and mentor who understands your site’s nuances and challenges.

But once you successfully come out of a couple of those situations, you see what you’re capable of doing and learning. You get a little braver with each success, though I still get a bit of that imposter syndrome. I know it’s part of the process in learning something new, so I try to learn something in every opportunity, if I can.

How were you supported early in your career?

I give a lot of credit to my leaders for the career I’ve been able to build. My leaders throughout the years have always been so supportive of my growth, and sometimes they’d see something in me that I didn’t see in myself, helping me step into some of these exciting but scary opportunities.

I also credit the supportive colleagues at site here. While I was a plant engineer, I spent around eight years in the control room with operators, and that was a core experience for me, learning their perspective. You can be a fantastic engineer, but if you design something that the operations team can’t practically operate, then it’s a failure – theory without practice. Working with them, developing great relationships with them at every level – I think that was foundational for my success.

I’m the team lead now for a group of process engineers as well as our laboratory team, and I recognize that part of my job is to pay forward the support I received. Part of that is having two of my engineers sitting with ops to learn those same fundamentals. Another big part is pushing people outside of their comfort zone a bit, to support them through their growth – to try to give them something different and challenging, and hopefully see something in them that they might not see in themselves. And not just for my team, but for people at the site overall. It’s part of what inspired me to launch the Ascend Employee Resource Group.

How did Ascend come to be?

Ascend is our women’s employee resource group that offers its participants interactive and engaging growth-focused events, addressing areas from self-awareness and speaking-up, to collaboration and productivity; helping women develop professionally and personally.

It grew out of an initiative we had on site in 2020, called Springboard, and when that program ended, I felt that we needed something else – something more and something permanent. After having a few conversations at site, it was suggested to me to start the program I was envisioning, so I created Ascend with the intent of helping women grow, especially in this industry, which continues to be male-dominated.

I can’t take all the credit though, my husband, who I actually met at Methanex while he worked here, did come up with the name!

Forming Ascend was another example of taking a chance, being vulnerable and being willing to fail, but doing it anyways. I was so surprised that people came to the first event and then the second event and so on. And now, it’s snowballed with chapters starting in other locations. I’m so humbled by that and the legacy I might be able to leave behind for others.