March 25, 2004

McMaster science co-op student receives national recognition

National Co-operative Education Week March 22 to 26

McMaster health physics student Lindsay Churchley received one of four honourable mentions from the CAFCE Co-op Student of the Year Award (2003).

Hamilton, ON - McMaster health physics student Lindsay Churchley has great insight into her future thanks to her co-operative placement that garnered her an impressive recognition from the Canadian Association for Cooperative Education (CAFCE).

Selected from among 74,000 post-secondary co-op students at 85 member institutions across Canada, the fourth-year student received one of four honourable mentions from the CAFCE Co-op Student of the Year Award (2003), based primarily on a job placement at Ontario Power Generation.

“One of the best things that co-op has done for me is it has given me the chance to try a variety of fields so that I can figure out which direction I would like to go in after graduation,” says Churchley. “I now know I want to be a health physicist.”

She will be honoured today, Thursday, March 25, for her honourable mention with a reception in General Science Building, Room 104 at 1:30 p.m.

Churchley’s nominator, Chris McLaughlin, co-ordinator of McMaster’s Science Co-operative Education & Career Services, says, “Lindsay is exceedingly deserving of this award because her terrific academic record has garnered numerous awards and scholarships, she is active in her community, her personal character is one of motivation and leadership, and, perhaps of most importance on this occasion, her stellar performance at recent co-op placements won her the high praise and respect of her peers and supervisors,” he says.

McLaughlin nominated Churchley specifically for her four-month full-time work term at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station last summer.

In Churchley’s first work term last year she was a research assistant with McMaster’s medical physics & radiation sciences unit. But it is because of her second co-op that Churchley now seeks work terms that will allow her to further explore health physics. This summer, she will work for the Department of Nuclear Medicine as a radiation safety assistant at the McMaster site of Hamilton Health Sciences. In September, she will travel to Brisbane, Australia for a four-month placement at the Centre for Medical, Health and Environmental Physics at Queensland University of Technology.

Churchley will return to McMaster in January and hopes to graduate in the spring with a Bachelor of Science honors majoring in medical physics co-op.