Epic challenge for students in 48-hour survival skills exercise
LOUGHBOROUGH College students found themselves on high alert in the dead of night as they were launched into an exciting public services challenge designed to push them way beyond their comfort zone.
The PSYOPS, or Psychological Operating Procedure, was only the beginning as 160 students battled the elements and increasing exhaustion on the 48-hour field survival skills exercise in the depths of Walesby Forest, Nottinghamshire. Only hours after arrival, students were assigned to direct probing patrols from a red lit operations room while others found themselves in a pitch black hostile environment, under drone surveillance and shocked by thunder flashes.
“The aim was to recreate all sides of an operation with students using surveillance and having to avoid detection by enemy forces. It really threw everyone in at the deep end,” said Loughborough College public services lead Tim Turner.
“It was the early hours before everyone crawled under the basic tarpaulin shelters we’d all made on arrival and then not even dawn when we woke everyone with a thunder flash.”
Students were kept on the go with a search and rescue – locating a casualty and safely evacuating the injured personnel – as well as time on the shooting range and the climbing wall, before they had to work out how to transfer goods across a ravine using ropes and cables without touching the ground. Dinner was preceded with a lesson on how to skin a rabbit.
After a second freezing night under tarpaulin, another packed day included a log run, a ‘blind line’ where blindfolded students had to find their way through an obstacle course and a crime scene analysis.