Skills Lab

The skills lab is the college’s practice room: one skill at a time, 6 students to 1 instructor, from the lab hour at 10:30 until the work is steady. Visitors may see it on an open lab morning.

What the lab hour asks

What do you bring?

Bring secondary-school completion with biology or a science course if you are entering the Diploma, and bring the willingness to stay on one skill after you miss it. The lab does not ask you to arrive already steady. It asks you to arrive able to be corrected in a group of 6. Uniform and the clinical kit are a one-time fee of $480, listed on the fees page, and they are the clothes and tools of the teaching day, not a second curriculum.

For a public visit, bring nothing but yourself. The open lab morning is the first Saturday of each month, 10:00 to 12:00, free, with no booking. That visit is not the admissions lab morning. The admissions lab morning sits with the interview, in April 2027, for people who have applied.

What do you practise?

You practise the skill that the hour has named. In the account we publish, that is often a dressing on a manikin arm, watched at close range, with the instructor’s hand pointing to the place the work has failed. It is not a new skill every ten minutes.

The room itself is a row of made beds, curtains drawn back, in long perspective, pale and quiet when the students have gone. Practice happens earlier, at 10:30, after bioscience and before lunch. Leila Haddad practised a reading here in her first term until the false finish was no longer the story she told about the wrap.

Hands wrap a dressing on a manikin arm while an instructor points.

An empty skills lab with a row of made beds and the curtains drawn back.

6 students, 1 instructor,
the same skill until it is steady.

What are you asked?

You are asked to stay. The line the college uses for this room is exact: 6 students, 1 instructor, the same skill until it is steady. Tomás Arriaga RN, Head of the Skills Lab, says that line as his own. You are asked to look where the hand points, to take the work down if it is wrong, and to do it again before the group moves on.

Debrief at 15:30 is a different station, in a circle, and it is where the hour can be spoken of once the hands have stopped. The lab hour ends before 12:30. Lunch is not an extension of the bench.

Three voices from the lab

Three people say what the rooms require: the bench, the simulation ward and a student who was new.

They are not a promise that every miss becomes a fond memory. They are what these three people say when they are asked what the rooms require.

Portrait of a man in his forties in plain pale scrubs, an instructor.

6 students, 1 instructor, the same skill until it is steady.

— Tomás Arriaga RN, Skills Lab

Portrait of a woman in her thirties in pale scrubs, a simulation ward instructor.

We stop the simulation and talk it through before we leave.

— Yuna Seo RN, simulation ward

Portrait of a woman in her twenties in pale scrubs against a plain wall.

My first reading was wrong. We stayed with that one skill.

— Leila Haddad, year-two student