Much to his surprise, Eric Swedlo will be spending part of his summer across the country where he will be working on creating solutions to real life social problems. Swedlo is one of three students in Cochrane and one of multiple students across Canada who will be taking part in SHAD – a program that inspires change-making and hones entrepreneurial skills. "I honestly did not expect that to happen at all, it was pretty shocking to me," Swedlo said. "Now, in just a couple of days, I'm shipping off to Newfoundland." The program focuses on STEAM learning – science, technology, arts and mathematics. The teen who just completed Grade 11 at St. Timothy Jr/Sr High School already has a number of projects within that realm under his belt. Starting in his Grade 10 year, Swedlo has been helping turn the school's main stage play into videos. Each night of the play, three camera's would record the performance. At the end of the showings, all the footage was reviewed by Swedlo, carefully selected for best angles and lighting and then edited together. He would then match the audio and copy the final product onto DVDs for all his classmates. Swedlo also helped create a program to help solve a seating conundrum with the school's annual Thunder Gala. "Everyone gets their tickets but there's always been a problem with feeding them. Because there's eight seats to a table and there's sometimes more than eight in a group or there are less than eight in a group and it's a hassle for the co-ordinators to fit everyone together nicely," he said. "So what I did was I wrote a program that would seat everyone automatically with preference with keeping their groups together and if it couldn't fit your group together, it would break your group in half so you would have some of your friends to sit with while meeting new people." At SHAD, Swedlo will be presented with more real life societal problems within his first week and he will be challenged to apply what he knows in all STEAM areas to come up with a unique solution. "There's no telling exactly what I'm getting myself into and that's kind of exciting in a weird, unplannable way," Swedlo said. The month-long program at Memorial University of Newfoundland will be packed with workshops, lectures and hands-on experiences. Two Cochrane High School students will also be participating in SHAD as well – Brady Church who will be attending the program at the University of Prince Edward Island and Grade 12 student Aiden Rowe will be attending the University of New Brunswick. So far there are already 16,000 and counting alumni from the summer program, which operates in 16 universities throughout Canada. One of CBC's Dragon Den entrepreneurs, Michele Romanow, is among the SHAD alumni from 2003. “We are thrilled that we are reaching a record 1,000 students this year. Support from our partners has allowed us to include more opportunities to transform lives. Our outreach team has been busy spreading the word to youth from different communities who can benefit from a month at SHAD. We are actively working to eliminate barriers and are now reaching into under-served communities,” said SHAD President and CEO Tim Jackson. “We hope program participants end the month not only dreaming big, but empowered with the tools and passion they need to take risks, roll up their sleeves and get going.”
