A truly Canadian co-op experience

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

During his first co-op work term with R.J. Burnside, a Canadian engineering and environment consultant firm, Grant Mitchell traveled to northwestern Alberta to meet with a First Nations community. It turned out that Mitchell’s first co-op experience would involve working on a truly Canadian project: building an indoor hockey rink.  

“There’s not much to do out there because it’s so far north,” said Mitchell, who is enroled in Geological Engineering at Waterloo. “They only have an outdoor hockey rink, so they were looking to get an indoor rink to play hockey more often. It's things like that – little things that we take for granted that the communities out there don’t have – that’s what we were trying to bring.”

The community development plan was for a small community of only about 225 people located approximately five hours away from Edmonton. “The entire plan was centered on building this hockey rink. That was at the forefront - anything that we could do to make sure there was a hockey rink there,” explained Mitchell.

Mitchell and the Burnside team also worked on plans to improve housing facilities and build shared living residences for elders in the community. Many of the homes in the community haven’t been refurbished in nearly 40 years. “There are quite a few members living off the land that would like to move back. Being able to fund housing is something that we were really interested in,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell enrolled in Geological Engineering at Waterloo in 2014 but deferred for a year due to a concussion. During that time, he secured a job as a mechanical engineering assistant at a goat cheese factory in his hometown of Lindsay, Ontario. The opportunity helped Mitchell add valuable work experience to his resume. “They needed an assistant for their engineer,” said Mitchell. “I just got my name in there and managed to get the job. In Lindsay, where there are no engineering jobs at all, I managed to sneak my way into one!”

In the future, Mitchell says he hopes to return to the community and visit the rink he helped build.