St. Clair Engineering Technology students given competitive advantage | St. Clair College
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Amico Infrastructures donated a Global Positioning System so that students in Engineering Technologies can learn on the latest equipment in the industry.
Amico Infrastructure directors pose with first-year Engineering Technology students

Amico Infrastructures donated a Global Positioning System worth $34,000 to St. Clair College's School of Engineering Technologies for use by students in three Engineering Technology programs, giving them what one company director described as a "direct advantage over students from other Colleges in Ontario."

"You will be able to say, ‘I have experience with the equipment you use at your company,'" said Tony Youssef, Amico's Technical Services Manager. "It's a competitive advantage for St. Clair College students. We don't offer this to any other colleges."

Amico will also cover the annual $4,300 subscription fee for the Leica iCON GPS, required to access the GPS satellite network.

"Our faculty and our staff work really hard to work with industry to make sure we are teaching to the latest technology being utilized in the field," Waseem Habash, Vice President Academic, told a group gathered for the presentation. "Without your support and help we would not be able to teach to the latest technologies."

Students in three programs – Civil Engineering Technology, Construction Engineering Technician and Architectural Technology – will now have the opportunity to learn surveying with the latest technology used in the construction industry.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver can fix its location by calculating its distance from three or more Earth-orbiting satellites, whose positions in space and time are known.

The U.S. Department of Defense created the Global Positioning System as an aid to navigation. Since it was fully opened to civilian use in 1994, the use of GPS positioning has expanded to everything from tracking delivery vehicles, to tracking the minute movements of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth's crust, to tracking the movements of human beings.

It has also become an indispensable tool in the surveying industry.

Tony Youssef, Technical Services Manager for Amico Infrastructures, describes to students details of the donated GPS equipment.