Quick Facts
Of parrots, crocs and temples, alumni and rice
Imagine you’re in a foreign country. You’re waiting for a friend to pick you up in a hotel lobby and the friendly hotel staff is feeding you something they call stretchmiguts. Then you hear your ride will be late because he is chasing a jaguar through the jungle. It’s not the opening to a movie. It actually happened when I was in Belize getting ready to visit two Lakeland alumni.
When I let colleagues know I was going to travel to Belize with a group from my church the first thing Lakeland staff members asked was, “Are you going to visit our alumni?” Since I planned to travel around Belize after my group’s return to Canada, a visit with Rodney and Steward Dyck became part of my itinerary.
I was familiar with who Rodney was. His face accompanies me on the banner I often have with me when I’m on the road recruiting for Lakeland College. However, I had never had the chance to really meet and get to know these two alumni. But I now had the opportunity that would be part of an adventure and learning experience.
Eat Yer Hat: We'll Judge 'em
by Lindsey Grover
Four members of the Lakeland College judging team made the long trek across the prairie to compete in Winnipeg and returned victorious.
Photo at right: Lakeland judging team members in their green jackets earned a lot of ribbons in Winnipeg. They are (far left) Garth Dinwoodie, Jan van de Brake (with hat), Lindsey Grover(second from right) and Megan Thompson(far right) are joined by members of other college teams at the University of Manitoba competition.
The trip started early on January 14 with the Vermilion crew--Megan Thompson, Garth Dinwoodie, Jan van de Brake and coach Peter Walsh--traveling to Lloydminster to pick up the last member of the team, me, Lindsey Grover. After misinterpreting the map, the Vermilion group finally managed to find the Lloydminster dorms.
With the whole group finally in the truck we headed towards our final destination of Winnipeg.
Prairie Paddlers Prove Proficient in Victoria
An early morning Friday flight on Oct. 23 took the women’s quad and I to Victoria for two of the biggest races in Western Canada. Both are head races in the classic fall style of long distance rowing-- the Saturday race in the Gorge is 5km in length and the Sunday race on Elk Lake is 8 km long.
An hour after arriving in Victoria the four-April Stanko, Lacey Longworth, Kim Noble, Alicia Dyck—were in the water putting in a two hour workout in a boat rented from the Gorge Rowing Club.
Pete's most awesome cropper tour--Brandon and back again
Agricultural sciences instructor Peter Walsh kept a diary of a trip this summer that took him to an alumni wedding in Manitoba. Along the way he visited with a number of other alumni. Here are excerpts from his trip log.
June 17, 2009
I pulled out of Vermilion at 10 am and began with a stop in Lloydminster at ADM to see Mark Symington a graduate of crop technology in the mid 1990s. Beside Mark at ADM is Steve Combres, a graduate of Lakeland College’s ag business program. Both have been with ADM for the past 15 years.
Later that day I moved on to North Battleford to visit the Viterra farm supply centre to see Nicole McRobert, an alumnae of our ag business crop stream program at Lakeland. Nicole is a customer service representative for Viterra who transferred to the farm supply center from the Marwayne location.
In the late afternoon made it into Saskatoon to see Thomas Redpath at Dyterra, an ag equipment re-fitter outfit. Thomas is a 2009 graduate from our crop tech program who will carry on at the U of S for his degree in agriculture.
Money from the Federal Government?...Shocking!
It truly was shocking. Last week Lakeland College received a shade under $1.5 million from the Government of Canada. This was matched by the Government of Alberta which enables Lakeland to (I hope you are sitting down) undertake an upgrade of our high voltage system on the Vermilion Campus.
I looked at the project submission and saw some diagrams, some cryptic acronyms and a heat sensitive photograph of some hot wires and connections (they must be hot because they were red). Turns out those wires don’t last forever, as I had assumed, but have a definite life span.
I did a little more research and discovered that this project has been on the books for about 10 years but has never received any funding and was too large to take on as a part of our regular capital replacement budget. It involves replacing wires and other electrical parts as well as moving overhead lines to underground.
So, other than the pun, what is so shocking?
Increased Enrolment – A Lakeland Success Story
Enrolment is typically regarded as the ultimate measure of a school’s success across most jurisdictions
I don’t agree that this should be the case. Program quality, meeting student needs and working with your community are all critical measures of college success although they are more difficult to measure. That said, enrolment (as measured by the number of full load equivalent students) is crucial to our success as it now has a direct bearing on our ability to attract new program grants.
A Diploma in Terrorism?
Recently Bruce Power of Ontario began studying possible locations for a nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan and Alberta. One of the possible sites being explored is north of Lloydminster, in the heart of Lakeland College’s region.
Nuclear power has been used for many years in Ontario however it is nowhere to be found on the Canadian Prairies. As you might expect, not everyone agrees with nuclear power citing, primarily, environmental concerns with respect to the leftover uranium.
A nuclear power plant would create many jobs through both the lengthy construction phase as well as the operational phase of the plant. There would almost certainly be demands for training and Lakeland, should the Lloydminster site be chosen, would be ideally situated to offer much of the training.
Should we?
