Student wins co-op award

Wilfrid Laurier University’s Equitable Life of Canada Co-operative Student of the Year award has been given to third-year business administration student Kaitlin Ouellette-Matthews.

Laurier’s co-op award recognizes the student with an outstanding job and academic performance within their position and their contribution to the co-op employer and education.

The award was sponsored by Equitable Life, an insurance company in Waterloo.

“It’s a well-rounded award and for a student to receive it, in this case Kaitlin Ouellette-Matthews, it’s quite an honour, I think, because it’s a very rigorous process to get the award,” said Laurie Lahn, manager of marketing and external relations for co-operative education.

According to Lahn, the choice to give Ouellette-Matthews the award came from her work in the co-op student advisory, as well as her involvement in extracurricular activities.

Ouellette-Matthews said the Laurier co-op award came up when she was also nominated for both national and provincial co-op awards.

“In the process of being nominated for those awards, Laurier came up to me and said we wanted to make a Laurier-based co-op award because we’ve never had one before,” Ouellette-Matthews continued.

“We’re always going on about how we have the best co-op program and a lot of other co-op schools have the awards for co-op, but we don’t, so I guess they kind of realized that they have the jump on the bandwagon too.”

The last time a student from Laurier won the national Co-op Student of the Year Award was when Amy Lajoie won in 1995.

Ouellette-Matthews believes the award will help students achieve their goals through the co-op program.