In
the first Semester of my school year in Canada I, Finn Ohlendieck, took the Aviation
Course available at Rick Hansen Secondary School. Mainly it was this
course, why I choose this school. And I think that was definitely the
right choice.
The
goal of the course was to give the student an overall view of the
industry sector aviation and give the student a change to see if this
is the right career for him before he even started it. It covered the
areas of engineering, manufacturing, and Maintenance, commercial or
sport pilot, air traffic controller, and airport management. It also
went over most of the private pilot license ground school.
Soon
after the course started we had three guest speakers in the
classroom, telling us their story of their job life in aviation. They
shared their experience about how they got into the job field and
gave us tips for our career.
Also
we did two excursions to the Abbotsford airport(1. One/2. One). There we were shown
the things we just learned about in real. And I really saw the things
we learned in there. There I realized that this course already
changed my view on planes. I spend time looking at different special
things or at the things I didn’t know. And took it apart in my mind
in the pieces I learned in the course.
Then
the wing project came. It was the main project of the course. In it
we were supposed to explain Bernoulli’s principle and to build a
wing, based on what we learned about wing design and Bernoulli. Also
I knew about Bernoulli’s principle before, it was interesting,
because I had to go into it way deeper than I did before. We had to
do the project in groups of two or three, but the person I partnered
up with kind of left me alone on that project. Because in Germany I
always worked with the same persons, I was used to it that if we
wanted to meet at 5pm, everybody was there at about 4:50pm. So also I
had to do most of the work and he never showed up, when we planned to
work, he gave me an important lesson: Better be prepared to do it
yourself. So this project not only showed me that physics is
everywhere, but also gave me a lesson about life.
Nearly
to the end of the semester we then did the fieldtrip to Seattle into
the Boeing Manufacturing. I’ve never even dreamed about standing in
these halls one day, the idea never came into my head. And then I was
there. I was standing in the middle of the Boeing manufacturing site,
and was realizing how near I was to everything. Up to then I thought
that I still had all a few years of school in front of me and then
when I finished that I could think about the career. But in there I
realized: When I get back to Germany there will be only to more
school years for me and both of them will influence my degree, so
when I go home everything I do is for my career.
The
last project then was the model plane. Since I spent some time at
home on building plastic models this was mainly a fun project for me
and not so much new.
The
final exam of the aviation course was a simulator flight in the
actual coastal pacific training simulator. We flew from Abbotsford to
Nanaimo.
My
career dream was and still is, to become a pilot. I don’t know
anymore, when and why I first wanted to become pilot, but I set me
the goal to become a pilot. So this course was for me a last check,
if this is really what I want to do for the rest of my life, and yes
it is.
The
course introduced me also a different school system. The German
school system doesn’t contain classes like this that prepare you
for your life and job, only the “academic classes”, but then all
of them. While here you have classes that can prepare you for life
and show you what to expect from a career and then decide what it is.
So also this is not really specific for this course and other classes
like automobile could also showed me that, I will remember it
together with this course.
Another
thing were the reflections. I never before had to write reflections
for a class and I never thought myself about reflecting what happened
on an excursion. But it really helped me, especially since language
was sometimes a problem for me, to learn something. For example, when
building the model plane, it was mainly fun for me and I didn't
really learned something from it, until I then wrote the reflection
and saw on the instructions what I had to write about I started to
see these things, and connections I wouldn't have found without it.
