Fleming College student Reginald Eddy has received the prestigious Prince of Wales Forest Leadership Award, which includes a $12,000 bursary and the opportunity to travel on exchange to the United Kingdom to complete a forest internship.
Eddy, in his fifth semester of Fleming College’s Urban Forestry Technician (UTF) Co-op program at the Frost Campus in Lindsay, was one of two Canadian students to receive the award from Canadian Institute of Forestry.
He is the first student at the diploma level to receive the award, which is offered to recent graduates or any student studying forestry in Canada at the diploma, undergraduate degree, or master’s degree level.
Every year, a total of four winners of the award — two from Canada and two from the United Kingdom — will take part in the international forestry student exchange program during the summer of 2017.
“Having an opportunity to work in the Duchy of Cornwall, an incredibly historic and well-managed private estate, is something I can barely imagine,” Eddy says. “I am looking forward most to being emerged in such a culturally significant part of the United Kingdom. My take away, I hope, will be a more encompassed understanding of the forestry industry and the addition of international connections in my professional network.”
“This is an incredible achievement for Reg, for our program, and for Fleming College,” says Tom Mikel, Coordinator of Fleming’s Forestry and Urban Forestry Technician programs. “We are so proud of him.”
The Urban Forestry Technician Co-op program is offered at Fleming’s Frost Campus within the School of Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences. The UFT program was designed as a diploma-degree program in partnership with the University of New Brunswick (UNB). Students spend two years at Fleming and two years at UNB and graduate with both a diploma and a degree in just four years.
