Alumni celebrate wedding anniversary and class reunion on same day
She noticed him as soon as she walked in, a handsome young man with blonde hair and a beaming smile at the back of the room.
It was the fall of 1974, the first day of classes for 90 incoming students in the University of Waterloo’s systems design engineering program.
And for two of them - teenagers Cille D’Eon and Rob Harris - it was the start of a 45-year partnership that would see them all the way through school, careers, marriage and parenthood.
Years later, memories of that first day were still vivid June 1 when they walked the halls of Engineering 2 again on their 40th wedding anniversary.
“He was in the back row,” said Cille. “I can still see his face.”
The couple’s anniversary had special significance this year because it coincided to the day with the 40th reunion of their tight-knit class.
Twenty-six classmates, just over half of the systems design engineering students who graduated with them in 1979, joined Cille and Rob for a day of tours, special lectures, beer tasting and a dinner party in the new Engineering 7 building.
The closeness of their class, in fact, was central to how they got together in the first place.
To make it through the demanding program, students quickly learned they had to work in informal study groups to tackle assignments.
Rob joined a group in Cille’s on-campus residence and by October they were dating. By Christmas, they were a couple.
“We just jelled,” said Rob, who now admits it was his future wife’s blonde friend who actually caught his eye that first day of class.
Co-op jobs sent them in different directions every other term, but they kept picking up where they left off. By their final year, they were engaged and juggling wedding and travel plans with job searches, exams and a fourth-year design project.
Cille and Rob both financed their way through school with co-op earnings, one of the features that attracted them to Waterloo.
One of just nine women in the class, Cille didn’t even know what engineering was when a high school guidance counsellor recommended it because of her affinity for math and science.
“My dad said ‘You can’t go into engineering, you’ll be taking a job away from a man,’” she recalled. “So I thought to myself ‘Watch me.’”
Married within a couple of months of their last exams, the newlyweds settled into jobs in Toronto.
Rob went on to a 35-year career in information technology at IBM in Toronto and then Ottawa.
Cille wore a hard hat and drove a pickup truck for a year in the construction industry - enduring sexist language and behaviour typical of the time - before finding a better fit as an industrial engineer at Kodak.
She later took some time off to have four sons, earned an MBA at York University and started a consulting business as a professional facilitator helping organizations improve their productivity.
“We both think like engineers, but I’m more practical and Rob is more theoretical - as students and as people, too,” said Cille. “It has helped us get through everything because we work so well together.”
Now semi-retired and living in cottage country about 90 minutes west of Ottawa, they are executive directors of a new program, Shop 2 Give, that brings together charities with companies that want to give back. Customers are connected on a website, healthandcharity.com, and the companies give back a percentage of revenue for the referral.
“The companies get exposure and consumers get to see a portion of their purchases go to charity,” said Rob. “Everybody wins.”
They are also developing a program - financed with half of their earnings from that venture - to support parents with adult children struggling to make their own way in the world, as one of their sons did.
“It’s a growing problem and we feel we have a story that a lot of other parents need to hear,” said Cille.
On top of that, they’ve resumed a keen interest in bridge - a game they learned at Waterloo Engineering - and hope to share their passion as activity directors on cruise ships.
Like so many other things in the busy life they’ve built together, it all goes back to lessons learned in one small area of about six classrooms in E2.
“For me, learning to problem-solve and work in teams was absolutely key, fundamental to everything I did later on in life,” said Rob.
“I agree with that,” added Cille. “And as a woman, my engineering degree gave me instant credibility that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
