Polytechnique shooting survivor Nathalie Provost to receive honorary doctorate

The gun control advocate and survivor of the 1989 school shooting is being recognized with an honorary doctorate at a ceremony in downtown Montreal.

More than 32 years after a gunman motivated by a hatred of feminists opened fire at École Polytechnique, killing 14 women and injuring others, Nathalie Provost will finally attend a convocation.

The gun control advocate and survivor of the 1989 shooting is being recognized on Thursday with an honorary doctorate at a ceremony in downtown Montreal. While she has two previous degrees from the school, Provost says traditional graduation ceremonies weren’t held back when she was a student, so Thursday’s will be her first.

Her thoughts, she said, will be on how deeply the school has marked her life — not only by the tragedy but also by the lifelong friends she made and the education she received.

“The adult person I’ve become is an engineer to the core,” she said in a phone interview. “Even if I don’t work as a classic engineer, I am one.”

Provost said she returned to class less than a month after being shot four times by Marc Lépine in the Dec. 6, 1989, massacre that’s widely believed to be Canada’s worst mass shooting specifically targeting women. She graduated with an engineering degree a few months later, in May 1990, and would go on to earn a master’s degree from the same school.

In retrospect, she said has realized that she felt she had something to prove in returning to class so soon.

“I think it was kind of a way to say to the world and to Marc Lépine, ‘You won’t stop me,”’ she said.

“‘You tried, but you won’t succeed.'”