Four Brampton college students win medals at provincial skills competition
Published May 17, 2024 at 4:43 pm
Four Sheridan College students at the Brampton Davis campus brought home hardware at the recent Skills Ontario Competition.
Sheridan’s Lucas Blackwood (Welding and Fabrication Technician in Brampton), Hardeep Bansal (Industrial Mechanics Millwright in Brampton) won silver medals, while Sirjan Singh and Jacob Christmas (both in Mechanical Technician – CNC & Precision Machining Brampton), took bronze at the annual event that features the province’s top skilled trades and technologies students
The event, held May 6-8 at the Toronto Congress Centre, included some 2,000 postsecondary students competing in 68 categories. Sheridan’s 15 competitors qualified in a school skills competition earlier this year.
“Earning a medal at Skills Ontario is a significant accomplishment for a skilled trades and technologies student, and something that identifies the remarkable skill they bring to their profession,” said Dr. Elizabeth Fabbroni, Dean of Sheridan’s Faculty of Applied Science and Technology. “We are immensely proud of all of our Skills Ontario participants and the faculty and staff who support them.”
Blackwood, a first-year student who caught the welding bug in Grade 11, finished 2nd out of 30 competitors in the welding division. He thanked professor Paul Gobbi for helping him register and skilled trades professor Carly Myers get ready for the competition.
“She saw the spark in my eye, encouraging and pushing me each step of the way, and I could not have done it without her,” Blackwood said of Myers.
Bansal (pictured below) admits to some early jitters in the competition which tested him in mechanical component alignment, stainless steel tube bending, pneumatics, centrifugal pump disassembly and inspection, drilling and tapping.
After receiving some advice, he became the only competitor to get a pneumatic circuit working en route to his silver medal finish.
“The adrenaline rush that I experienced after finishing that task was phenomenal,” said Bansal.
Singh capped off his three years at Sheridan with a bronze medal win. After tutoring peers, the student will now begin a career with automotive technology supplier Magna.
Christmas, who also brought home bronze, first began manual machining at the age of 15 and used his experience to help Rick Hansen’s high school robotics team a few years ago.
Sheridan was also represented at the provincial skills competition by an interactive booth. The booth included demonstrations and exhibits of welding, robotics, advanced manufacturing, ethical hacking, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, automation, architecture, urban design, electrical trades and more.
