Instructor Bryan Necessary helps a student in an Electrical Power & Control lab class. (6/2)

6-3-09
Student on his way to class through the TSTC mall. (This scene has changed - now it is torn up to install new chilled water pipes).

6-4-09
Instructor of the Year Deann Graham celebrates with her students in the Web Club. (I should point out that Deann was voted instructor of the year by the Student Government Association - a REAL honor!)

6-5-09
Walking on water? A student takes a leap off the diving board at the SRC pool. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (The SRC is the Murray Watson Student Recreation Center)

6-8-09
Student Chad Pate plays golf with his son on the Golf Course & Landscape Management four-hole practice course. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (This course is in addition to our on-campus 18-hole golf course - really. The small course is intended to be a student lab, so playing it is FREE.)

6-9-09
Aviation Maintenance student, Christopher Mitchell enjoys the warm weather during a class break. (I’m glad that Christopher is enjoying the ‘warm’ weather, I’m burning up!)

6-10-09
A student works out in the Student Recreation Center. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (I’m thinking that we should try to keep this guy happy.)

6-11-09
Automotive students Kayla Roberson, Esteban Trevino and Tom McKinley watch as their lab partner Lonnie Robinson works with a drill press in AUMT 1305. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student

After I announced that I was going to show more photos of life around our technical college, the TSTC Waco flickr page beat me to the punch by deciding to add a photo per day of campus life during June. Here is the first one (6/1/09):

Good morning June! The sun rises over the TSTC airport.

I have been trying to get pictures of TSTC campus scenes. A lot of people don’t know what kinds of things go on at a technical college. It is different from a community college, but there are a lot of parallels. Here are some electronics students that I ran across in the Spring.

Why are these students playing with electric racing cars and lighted replicas of famous buildings?

What is underneath that has them working so hard?

Not much down there, really - just hours and hours of work programming microproccessors to control all of the systems in the “city.” Digital students know these processors inside out when they leave this course!

I’ve been using an iPhone 3G for the last couple of months (I intend to do a full review soon). I downloaded the MotionX GPS app from the app store and found it to be a lot of fun. I decided to use the GPS “Stopwatch” feature on my trip home from work. As you can see from the picture below, it took me nearly 36 minutes to travel 33.6 miles at an average speed of 56.6 mph. The surprising thing is that my 4-cylinder 5-speed Camry was able to reach a top speed of 208.3 mph!

GPS is very time-dependent, and I am assuming it was time error. I’m just glad the highway patrol wasn’t monitoring this. The fine for going 208 in a 70 mph zone must be huge.

I previously covered the TSTC student who was trying to get his iPhone application approved. It is now done. Read all about it here.

A TSTC Marshall student also had an application approved by Apple. Read about that here.

It has been busy and I have been remiss in blogging. Stay tuned.

The local paper has noticed the college a lot lately.  Here is an roundup:

Waco TSTC student would like to cash in on iPhone application ‘goldmine’

Dolan is awaiting approval from Apple for an application he developed called “Pocket Puppy Raiser,” which he designed to raise money for Guide Dogs of Texas Inc., an organization devoted to training guide dogs for visually impaired Texans.

Elton Stuckly, guest column: Jobs are there, and here (a column from the Boss!)

While the U.S. economy may seem soft right now, don’t let it fool you, and most of all, don’t panic. There are still jobs available – especially for technically skilled workers. Other fields may be adapting, changing or rearranging, but Texas has always emerged on top as a strong economic force, and one of the leaders in innovation and job creation.

High-skill jobs drive Waco pay gains

Company president Mike Sullivan said the factory jobs typically require at least a technical degree from a place like Texas State Technical College, followed by an apprenticeship training program at the factory.

And saving the best for last -

3 TSTC grads planned additions for Cameron Park Zoo as class assignment

Velia Garcia-Reyes, and plans she made for Cameron Park Zoo.

“What I have been impressed by with these young women is their professionalism,” Cox said. “They listened to what we said we needed, but they had their own ideas as well. The result is more original and more functional than we anticipated.”

Thanks Waco Trib, for covering these stories that are important to TSTC, Waco, and Texas.

I had the opportunity to visit the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas on Saturday.  It was a great day with hundreds of teams of intelligent and motivated kids.  I saw teams from Colombia, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, The United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, and all across the USA.  I snapped some pictures with my iPhone.

The results of the competition can be found HERE.  Congratulations to the team from Greenville, TX listed at the top.  (Innovation First/VEX is also headquartered in Greenville).

Banner at the door of the Dallas Convention Center

Note that the competition got support from names like Autodesk, EMC, and NASA.

The main competition floor for middle and high school students

The main competition that I watched involved both autonomous and controlled operation to stack blue or red cubes in designated areas, scoring for the respective team.  Defense was also practiced and a solid “blue” goal didn’t always stay that way for long.

One of the many Chinese teams attending the competition

A Colombian post-secondary team

The competition is piloting post-secondary competition to give engineering students some hands-on experience.  There were far fewer teams than on the secondary side, but they were from all over (including Rice University here in Texas).

The Syntax Error team "mascot" costume

Zany hats, t-shirts, and costumes helped to show team spirit.

Repair work with Dremel in the pits

A lot of schools use these robots and the curriculum built around them to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines.  Check out the link above for more information.  I really wish that I had taken my Flip video camera to this one!

UPDATE: I note that the Mythbusters tested the VEX system and came away favorably impressed.  Go HERE to read the story. (NOTE: The VEX system is no longer sold at Radio Shack).

A member of our faculty sent me this newsletter from Design Data that contained a story about one of our Drafting and Design Technology graduates:

Tiffani Cortez started working with SDS/2 while studying at Texas State Technical College (TSTC) in Waco, Texas. The SDS/2 class within the drafting and design curriculum — which includes 32 hours of lecture and 64 hours of lab time — provides students with hands-on SDS/2 experience, which in turn produces students who hit the marketplace ready to go to work.
After Cortez graduated with an associate of applied science degree in drafting and design technology in August 2007, she was, “ready to put use something I learned in school…SDS/2.” For Cortez, that was a drafting and design detailer position at Central Texas Iron Works (CTIW), one of the leading structural steel fabricators in the industry.
“I know one of the main reasons I got this job is because I took this class,” Cortez said of her SDS/2 coursework at TSTC. In fact, as part of the class, the students toured CTIW’s 240,000-square-foot facility, and Cortez picked up a job application and applied. She was hired at CTIW six months prior to graduation.
The native Texan is happy to have landed a job in Waco, close to friends and family, and at a company that allows her to work on projects from all over the world. “CTIW is an awesome company to work for. They do a lot for the community and for their employees… CTIW is like a big family,” Cortez said.

- I love what we do!  (For the rest of the “Joy” series, click here)

There is an interesting post at The Infrastructurist called Wind Power’s Dirty Little Secret.  There is also quite a debate raging in the comments.

It is a question worth asking!  Government money can train, but the private sector must sustain.

The New York Times notes again that sloppy thinking about degrees and marketable skills can hurt, especially in this economy.

They bought into the notion that if they went to college — never mind the debt — their degree would lead to a lucrative job. And repaying their student loans would never be a problem.

But the economic crisis has turned those assumptions on their ear as thousands of recent graduates have been unable to find jobs or are earning too little to cover the payments for loans that are sometimes as high as $50,000.

Actually, this was always a risky assumption.

Read the whole thing.

There is good coverage at Popular Science -

(and a photo slideshow).

… to excel in math, science, and technology!  See their website here.

Read a little about their visit to TSTC Waco here.

We had a delightful visit this week from a group of vice presidents from Chinese technical colleges. In the picture above (from left to right): our translator from George Mason University, Hua Jian of Wuxi Institute of Technology, Elton Stuckly - President of TSTC Waco, Dr. Zhang Huibo of Ningbo Polytechnic, and Tian Nai Lin of Chengde Petroleum College.

Our guests were brought to us by Dr. Al Pollard of McClennan Community College. They were keenly interested in all things technical and asked excellent and insightful questions. They also took a lot of pictures and video.

Our tour included an engines class in our Toyota lab. TSTC Waco was recently given an award by Toyota as one of the top programs in the country.

Jerry Davis of Instrumentation, Computerized Controls, and Robotics explains how the Delta V HMI (Human Machine Interface) controls the actions of TSTC’s state of the art digital process control trainer. The trainer was built by TSTC instructors with generous donations from our industry partners.

Case Jones and his students demonstrate the importance of motion capture to gaming and simulation design to our vistors.

Our guests enjoyed using the games written by our Game Programming students. We are proud of the fact that our students wrote the gaming engine.

As you can see, the game is a lot of fun!

Student projects in the High Performance Computing lab. After learning the principles on these, they move up to the real thing.

We visited a lot of other areas of campus, including Industrial Systems, Welding, Laser/Electro-optics, and Mechanical Engineering. Our visitors also had the opportunity to eat the meal prepared by our Culinary Arts students.

It was a great day and it is always fascinating to meet people from a different part of the world - especially if they are in the same business.

The Waco Trib has a story on TSTC Advertising Design and Print student Jose Sandoval.  Read it HERE or click on the image below.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Are students who don’t thrive in a traditional education track academic failures or valuable experiential learners?  That is the question answered by this video about the Institute of Technical Education in Singapore.  (For some reason, the introduction plays twice, but the video is still excellent).

Please note the following:

• Importance of technical education to maintain infrastructure
• Reducing technical education stigma
• Providing university-class facilities for technical education students
• Making certain that no skill is wasted

The introduction says that ITE is an innovation, but they are doing what we do in U.S. technical education - links to industry, focus on faculty industry experience, hands-on learning, etc.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they came here to study technical education.  What they have done differently is to  invest the money to make technical education a priorty.  First-class facilities and student services make the students feel more valued and valuable.

Our focus on 4-year degrees is hurting our competitiveness, not helping.

This is how to respond to the need for welders.

There is an excellent post over at the TechCareers blog on technical education trends in Texas. A slideshow of interesting stats and quotes by TSTC Associate Vice Chancellor Michael Bettersworth linked there is worth watching. Here is a sample showing the challenge Texas has in filling technical jobs while attendance at technical programs is down:

UPDATE: TechCareers Blog, a collaboration between TSTC Publishing and TSTC Emerging Technogies, has been added to the blogroll.

Texas State Technical College invaded the beautiful rotunda and halls of our magificent Capitol building in Austin on Tuesday March 24.  We had a great day with technology exhibits, an ice cream social, and delivery of a small gift and note from our Chancellor to every legislative office by our own TSTC Student Ambassadors.  A resolution proclaiming Texas State Technical College Day was passed in each house- one introduced by Representative Doc Anderson and the other by Senator Kip Averitt.

See a quick overview in my YouTube video:

… Is to not tell them that they are smart, according to a study written up in Scientific American. Here is a nice counterpoint to the book by Charles Murray that I reviewed earlier:

Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent-and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed-leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.

The point is less that intelligence is unimportant, than the idea that over-reliance on intelligence and innate ability tends to demotivate. Hard work DOES make a difference. Read the whole thing.

Our culinary program (FSC - Food Service/Culinary Arts) received a glowing review in a guest column by the mother of a student in the Waco Trib on Sunday. It was nearly overlooked since our Aviation Maintenance program had a color picture on the front page Monday, but it deserves a mention and an excerpt:

Recently I saw in vivid detail where it appears my college-student daughter is going. It was so glorious as to make your mouth water…

Like many of the nationally recognized programs at TSTC, this is one of the best-kept secrets in town.

Armed with a passion for learning and a goal to succeed, students who enroll in food service/cullinary arts or any of the exemplary programs will be guided by top-notch (even award-winning) instructors using state-of the-art equipment.

Employers know that TSTC students gain the requisite knowledge and practical experience to meet workplace demands. They learn while using cutting-edge equipment in the labs, whether it is the blast-chiller in the food service lab or high-powered lasers in the nanotechnology program.

What she said!!!!

UPDATE: I had a fabulous meal at culinary today: Hot and sour soup (which I normally hate, but this was delicious), spring rolls, and an outstanding duck salad (Tea-Smoked Duck over Mung Bean salad).

There was a great (FRONT PAGE!) article in the Waco paper on Monday that I have been too busy to blog about. The title says Local officials: Employers looking for skills and specialized training, not just four-year degrees. It mentions programs at TSTC (Aviation Maintenace and Automotive Tech) and McClennan Community College (Accounting and Nursing). The article also covers the important link to high schools for the programs.

My take: It’s a great article that gets to the heart of what we need to be doing - getting students serious about job skills starting in high school (not about degrees alone).

The New York Times has decided to include Texas State Technical College in “All the news that’s fit to print.” The article, Federal energy initiatives buoy hopes of job hunters, discusses “green job” money available from the Obama administration.