Fleming College

Kenneth Racelis

Aquaculture, 2014

I am currently employed at Marine Harvest Canada as a Saltwater Technician I in British Columbia, working as a "floater" at two out of the four sea cage sites in the Quatsino Sound Area on the northern part of Vancouver Island. I work at sea cage sites farming Atlantic salmon for food consumption, and work eight days straight andhave six days off. I practice fish husbandry techniques from feeding, handling fish and observing; and use technical skills like using a microscope to identify plankton or look at gills, performing environmental monitoring and entering data.

My Aquaculture post-grad certificate didn't help me land this job-- just being in this program helped me. There were so many different companies and organizations that wanted to reach out to my class so they could potentially hire one of us. We were exposed to companies in Ontario, the MNR, out West and East, the U.S and even New Zealand. Basically, the jobs were trying to find us. I would recommend the Aquaculture program to anyone who would love to work with marine or freshwater life; you are almost guaranteed a job even before you graduate, like I did.

At Fleming College, I had a small class that guaranteed one-on-one attention, which I enjoyed and helped me better understand the content. The Frost Campus has two hatcheries - the Muskellunge and Atlantic salmon hatcheries - and I have worked in both and loved learning in those environments closely with the fish. Every single day at school you're in a hatchery getting hands-on experience. For my final-semester internship, I completed it in B.C. with Marine Harvest Canada and was hired as a new employee, not an intern. My experience was extravagant.