There is a moment where learning becomes doing and that is at the heart of Lakeland’s new practical group assessment component of the process and power engineering program (PPE).

In the assessment, second-year PPE students are placed into groups of two or three, they choose a shift lead, and they are given 90 minutes to complete a plant start up and shut down. The assessment takes place in Lakeland’s Cenovus Energy Production Lab, a functioning power lab with real tech, real steam and real stakes. And it’s the final step in the students’ journey to prove they’re ready for the real world.

“When you’re out in the workforce, you have to qualify for a plant,” Carter Cammidge, second-year PPE student, explains. “You have a period of time to learn your plant and then you go through a qualifying stage where someone tests you on everything to make sure you’re able to run the plant. This group assessment is basically like that on a smaller scale.”

Cammidge was paired with two other students for his group assessment. They met up a few days before the test to come up with a game plan, deciding who was best equipped to tackle specific parts of the process, as well as their strengths and weaknesses as a group.

“Just like any important test, you have nerves going into it, but once you sit down and start writing, the nerves go away as long as you’ve done your prep and paid attention in class,” Cammidge says.

Part of the assessment involved individual tasks, like starting the three different boilers, and other parts relied on the group working together. For 90 minutes, he and his classmates worked through starting the boilers, getting the water feed going, starting the turbines and syncing the generator. They got the cooling tower up to prevent exhaust from getting too hot and then, once it was up and running, they had to safely shut it down again, all while dealing with curveballs from their instructors, like pieces of equipment that had to be found and turned on before they started.

“One of the biggest parts of power engineering is that you need to know enough about your plant to catch it before it goes down, to bring it back up and to safely shut it down” says Cammidge. “And you need to be able to show that you know it that well to be a qualified operator. This practical exam is a good testament to show that I was in school for eight months. Do I know enough to do this? And my group definitely showed that we had enough knowledge to do it.”

With the exception of a few tiny mistakes, his group did quite well.

"It solidifies that you know what you’re doing and that helps you going forward,” Cammidge says. “We’re going to be out in the workforce soon and it’s nice to have proof of what we learned in these last two years.”

First-year students in the program also completed a practical assessment this year, Cammidge says, which will be even more helpful as now they’ll be able to look back on their results in their second year and have an idea of what they need improve on to become a better operator in the end.

Learning these skills in Lakeland’s Energy Centre just makes the experience that much better, according to Cammidge.

“I’d heard right from the start that the power labs here were the best. And they’re continually being upgraded and made better, even from the start of the year to what we have now. It’s incredible that in the second half of your second-year we do our own shifts - we are our own shift leads. It’s our plant, we figure it out and run it. We’re doing this now.”