 My name's Katie Altoft and I'm the coordinator of the Environmental Management Assessment Postgraduate Program in our School of Environment and Horticultural Studies. So our program is a one-year postgraduate. There are eight courses in each semester and it's intended to be really kind of finishing school. So we find that students come with a variety of different backgrounds, everything from deep environmental studies to things like communications, environmental governance, etc. And they know a lot of things but they feel like they don't know how to actually execute in the industry. So they've likely looked for work and haven't been particularly successful and even more concerning don't really see themselves in the job descriptions that they're looking for so they don't feel like they're qualified to do the jobs that they're applying for. So many of them choose to come back for an extra year in the hopes that they'll get some practical hands-on skills and be able to see themselves in those positions to be more competitive in the environmental industry and to be able to understand a little bit more about what they would like to do and wouldn't like to do in the environmental industry. So from that perspective we have a real obligation to make the program as practical as possible. So we're in the very fortunate position that we don't have to teach them the boring stuff because someone has already done us that paper. We get to teach some of the hands-on skills, the real finishing activities that would make them very attractive to an employer. So a good consultant, someone who would be effective in a policy position in the government, someone who could walk into a PR position or someone who could be the environmental coordinator of an organization. So to do that in the courses we always try to make them as practical as possible. Certainly from a student's perspective I want them to graduate here with a much more effective resume so they'll have a hands-on work placement but also a bunch of projects. So instead of I took this course I completed this project for this client. So they have a portfolio that speaks to what they can do. They don't have to say I can do this. They can say here I've done it. And so that requires a significant amount of work on our end because you need a constant supply of clients who are willing to let us do the work but if you think about it from a resource perspective it's an absolute tragedy to have 50 graduate students working on environmental issues that aren't real. So working on a project that's for the sake of school when you have a bunch of clients around the region who can't afford to get this kind of work done. So we've done an enormous number of projects across the region since the beginning of the program but I'm going to tell you today about one specific one that we're working on right now. The City of Welland was presented with a challenge a couple of years ago when the atlas landfill landed on their doorstep and so what this was is it was a hazardous waste landfill that atlas had been using for many years to dump slag as part of their production. One of the challenges is it was extremely close to the Welland River, a highly contaminated site and it became the city's obligation to clean it up. Sites of that magnitude were obviously very expensive to clean up and they didn't have the budget to do that so they looked for a creative solution and found one when Walker Industries came and said you know in a partnership scenario they'd be willing to clean up the site if they could use it then for their landfilling operations. So part one of the project was born and that happened and it's been ongoing since that time Walker's has been using it as a landfill. The landfill is very close to its useful life and as a result they're beginning to look at closure plans and that's where we stepped in. So this has been a site of challenge for the city and they were looking for solutions about what they should do with it. After the closure happened looking for a public acceptance of a potential conversion to parkland and looking at someone to help them walk through some of the legal steps that would be required for landfill closure, remediation of a contaminated site, conversion to parkland so that's where we came in. And so this project spans six of our courses currently. We are doing a phase one environmental site assessment of our contaminated sites project. We have done a PR project where we did a public open house to get public feedback on potential options for the project. We are doing an ecological restoration design for the project and we're doing the open houses now that the design selection has happened. So our intent is to be able to kind of walk this through everything from presentations to public outreach to technical sampling and analysis to a phase two environmental site assessment to a risk assessment to closure and at the end the students will not only have made a number of connections in many important partnerships around the region but also have a portfolio of complete projects that they can take to an interview and say here's just a sample of what I can do for you.