Skills Work - At Camp!

Cambrian College, Sudbury

Hi everyone!  This is Nikki.  You’ll all be pleased to know that I’m a lot less terrified than I was before camp.  I haven’t done a lot of this hands-on kind of stuff, and I was pretty scared of looking dumb…or hurting myself.  But I did just fine.  In fact, I had a lot of fun!

I spent my first week at camp at Cambrian College.  I was sooo nervous because I thought I would be the only girl, but I wasn’t.  And we did so many different things with the professors from the college, and with our camp leaders Mo and Will, that I didn’t have time to be nervous!

One of our workshops was AutoCAD, with Phil.  Lots of people in industry use AutoCAD to make technical drawings of all kinds of stuff – airplane parts, musical instruments, even houses!  We used it to make drawings of race cars.  I’m pretty good at computers. I use MSN and Facebook and I make games and stuff all the time, so I figured it would be way easy.  But this was trickier than I thought it would be.  I liked it anyway, though, because it was challenging.

The next day was super busy.  We started with an electrical workshop.  I thought it would be boring, but again I was surprised.  There’s a lot that goes into wiring different types of electrical things, as I found out from our workshop leaders, Marcia and Scott.  We kind of moved to different stations, working on a panel, and wiring a switch, an outlet and a motor.  When I have my own house someday, I’m totally going to wire outlets and stuff in it, just because I can!

In the afternoon, we went on a tour of CBC radio.  We totally got to make our own news broadcast!  It was really, really cool.  Like we were real newscasters!  There was a weather person out on the street, and everything!  Our tour was led by Markus Schwabe, who hosts Morning North on CBC.  I think my parents listen to him and I thought it was totally lame that they listen to CBC radio.  But Markus was so nice, maybe I’ll start listening too.  When I’m not sleeping in!

I really liked our carpentry workshop.  The workshop leader was Steve, who I found out also volunteers at the big skilled trades competition that Skills Canada – Ontario has in the spring every year.  Steve showed us how to make wooden boxes.  I didn’t know that glue is used so much in woodworking.  I thought it was nails.  But the nails are only to hold everything together until the glue dries!  Anyway, now I have a good hiding place to keep my stuff away from my little brother.  And I made it myself!

Not gonna lie, I was pretty surprised by my first week.  I had a lot of fun, and I met some really nice kids, and I got to try all kinds of new stuff!  I don’t know that I’ve picked a career out of just one week, but I definitely have way more to think about.  Maybe I’ll get more ideas at the next camp!