Practicum experiences sometimes take students outside their comfort zones into new territory and new environments, giving them opportunities to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to do.
CMU alumna Megan Klassen-Wiebe’s practicum took her to Cedar Lane Farm, a small, mixed, family-run farm in Coles Island, New Brunswick for five months in 2009. There, she was involved in a wide variety of activities, including gardening; feeding and watering animals (pigs, chickens, turkeys); butchering chickens and turkeys; milking cows; collecting eggs; stacking hay bales; making granola and granola bars; and selling goods at the market.
Klassen-Wiebe graduated from CMU in 2009 with a general BA, and at first wasn’t too sure about her professional future.
“This experience gave me a chance to explore a passion in myself that I had only just discovered at CMU,” she says of her practicum. “It was a way for me to begin to look beyond the community of CMU and to see into the greater world. It made me aware of issues that I wanted to think about further in life and gave me a purpose beyond my CMU graduation.
“It was through this practicum that I decided that I wanted farming to be a part of my future, and led me to studying Agroecology at the University of Manitoba,” say Klassen-Wiebe.