Quick Dips

Working Cooperatively Between Laboratory and Classroom

Christchurch Polytechnic has been pleased with the 90% successful job placements it has had with its post-graduate Diploma in Laboratory Technology, seeing an increasing role for science technicians.

According to Dr Selwyn Maister, head of the Polytech's Science and Computing Department, labs need more skilled personnel to cope with more stringent quality assurance requirements, the imposition of international standards, and computerised instrumentation and data handling. He has seen increasing interest from university science graduates who use the diploma programme to pick up specific technical skills.

Part of the programme consists of a cooperative education unit, where students are sent out to local industries for 12 weeks to familiarise themselves with the procedures and practices of a working laboratory. Maister stresses that this unit is expected to provide benefits for both the student and the company involved.

In the last intake, G L Bowron & Co Ltd, a Christchurch sheepskin tannery, took on student Carol Chin. The learning contract covered a number of projects, including including assessment of alternative scouring chemicals, exhaustion studies on wool dyeing, and extending the database on some of the physical characteristics of finished woolskins.

"In any busy industrial laboratory there are always some aspects of the production processes for which more detailed data would be useful. These often cannot be carried out because the day-to-day demands of a production plant on the technical staff do not allow sufficient uninterrupted time for such projects," says the company's chief chemist Murray Mackay.

From Chin's perspective, an insight was gained into the demands of working in a production environment operating on an around-the-clock basis. The placement also allowed her to gain some first-hand experience of the implementation in an industrial environment of ISO 9002 quality accreditation.

As a Canterbury University chemistry graduate, Chin was able to extend her experience in both the factory setting and the laboratory, and she credits the experience with helping her gain a job as an analytical technician at Lincoln's Plant Protection Research Unit.