THUNDER BAY – Sachin Sampath says if he’d stayed in his native India to study, he likely wouldn’t have had the same access to the state-of-the-art equipment found in Confederation College’s instrumentation lab.
Powered in part by an in-kind donation valued at $330,500 from Lakeside Process Controls, the newly renovated lab is simply remarkable, the second-year student said.
“It’s so amazing to see the equipment working,” Sampath said on Friday, at an event unveiling the lab, located in the college’s TEC Hub facility, to the public.
“For most of the students here, they were studying instrumentation back in India, but the problem was we didn’t have any practical experience. So having this equipment that is actually being used in the industry right now is a very big blessing for us.”
When he graduates, Sampath said he won’t need extensive on-the-job training to familiarize himself with the equipment or have to worry that he doesn’t have the hands-on experience many employers require these days.
“I can just start applying for jobs,” he said.
Mike Colaneri, account manager at Lakeside Process Controls, said all of the equipment found in the lab, named after his company, is relevant to work currently being done in Northwestern Ontario.
It means students can not only obtain the skills in the region, often they can find employment without having to pack up and leave.
“The students will greatly benefit from working hands-on with the equipment in this lab,” Colaneri said.
“This equipment is relevant in equipment process control strategies. In Northwestern Ontario, we have heavy industry, such as pulp and paper and mining and all of the equipment used here today is relevant in that industry to maintain and control other process for optimization to essentially control their end product.”
Colaneri said it made a lot of practical sense to be involved in the lab renovation.
“We saw the true potential of the students and their needs and we were happy to be a part of their journey.”
College president Kathleen Lynch said technology is ever changing and it was clear their former lab needed a major upgrade to allow students to compete for employment.
“This upgrade is actually allowing us to be a world leader,” Lynch said.
“(Students) are going to be trained on state-of-the-art equipment. So when they’re going out into the working world, they have the experience on the equipment that employers might not even yet have. They’ll be able to be very adaptable to any environment and know how to use state-of-the art equipment if that exists in their employer’s environment. It’s essential for them. They know what’s possible and they can work on the equipment and be job-ready when they graduate.”
The lab has been equipped to allow for a remote configuration to support the school's current hybrid learning model and each piece of equipment has been labelled with a QR code to allow students easy access to forms, manuals, schematics, videos and instructions. It not only allows access to lab equipment outside of regular classroom hours, it's also mostly paperless.
