Each year, Metro Prep’s kinesiology students head to the University of Waterloo for Lab Days, trading their usual classroom for a working university lab setting.

The day is built around hands-on work, experiments and demonstrations covering biomechanics and anatomy, with a look at how those pieces come together in human performance. Instead of reading about how the body moves under load or stress, students test it themselves, using the same equipment and methods used in Waterloo’s kinesiology program.

For a class that spends much of the year working through theory, the trip gives everyone a chance to see where that theory actually leads. Students often come away with a better sense of what a kinesiology degree looks like in practice, and a few usually leave with a potential career path in mind that they had not considered before.

It’s also a chance to spend a day on a university campus, sitting in on labs and walking through buildings that most students only get to see once they’ve already applied.