PHOTOS: Sheridan College Unveils Brand New $50M Building in Brampton

Brampton | Ontario | Latest News |

Published April 6, 2018 at 12:47 am

Sheridan College held its grand opening for the $50 million Skilled Trades Centre (STC) at the Davis Campus in Brampton on Thursday.

Sheridan College held its grand opening for the $50 million Skilled Trades Centre (STC) at the Davis Campus in Brampton on Thursday.

“It started as a replacement to the old building, but merged into making it sustainable and cutting-edge,” said Sheridan’s associate vice-president for corporate planning Andre Plante.

“It’s a bridge between the past and the future.”

The main goal is to provide a better environment for students that will move them from an old building to a state-of-the-art facility.

The equivalent, much older STC was previously located in Oakville, just off of the Trafalgar campus, he added, which made it isolated from the students.

“It’s important for our students to have the full campus experience,” said Plante, “and also, for those who want to take business courses or who are interested in engineering, to see the other programs that are available.”  

Featuring 130,000 square feet of workshops, classrooms, facilities, machinery and equipment, the three-storey STC houses students in trades such as electrical work, plumbing, machining, industrial mechanic millwright, welding and tool and die.

It also gives students the opportunity to be integrated and get the one campus experience, said special advisor to the president Michelle McCollum.

“All the different types of students we have, and all the different types of programs we have, stems from cross mingling and collisions happening from different students being able to speak together,” McCollum said.

The school offered skilled trades learning from the beginning but moving the building to Brampton and connecting it to the full campus offers students those potential collaborations and pathways to different programs, said spokesperson Susan Atkinson.

“A lot of students like the applied career paths, and Ontario needs those types of skills,” Atkinson said.

“It’s a match made in heaven.”

There are currently 1,500 students enrolled in the skilled trades, she said.

Of those, here’s the gender breakdown for the 2017-2018 academic year: 93 per cent are male and seven per cent are female, said institutional research and planning coordinator Pam Sondhi.

Those rates are changing though, as more and more female students are coming into the program, but the majority of the students are still male, Plante said.

The STC opened to students last fall.

Photos by Ross Lopes

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