As I was attending the ceremony opening the new Clearview data center in Waco, I ran into the young man pictured below.

Matthew Pevey greeted me and reminded me that he was a student of mine.  He is now a graduate of the Computer Networking & Systems Administration program at TSTC Waco.  He is also the Operations Supervisor at the new data center!  He has several other TSTC graduates working for him and hopes to have more before long.

I love what we do!

The Clearview data center opening is another reason to love what we do.  TSTC and the Texas Workforce Commission partnered to meet their personnel needs. Clearview is very happy with the graduates they hired after interviewing at the college.

Waco Mayor Virginia Dupuy cuts the ribbon surrounded by the Clearview partners and Sarah Roberts from the Greater Waco Chamber. (best snap ever from an iPhone 3G - I think it was the lighting)

This interior shot shows a room ready to be packed with super-dense blade servers.

The building, an old fallout shelter, is perfect for safe data storage.  They have ramped up the power (5 MW from 4 different circuits plus 2 backup generators - expandable to 15MW) and the cooling.  The fiber connections are ready to go.

For more about the new center, please read here.

UPDATE: KXXV Channel 25 has posted video from the event, including a short interview with TSTC high performance computing guru Walton Yantis (warning: an advertisement comes first).

Watching this video from the NBC evening news will help you understand the post that follows.

Yesterday, we had the privilege to visit the founder and board of the IGNITE program in Fredericksburg, Texas. The high school rocketry program, founded by teacher Brett Williams in the mid-nineties, has spread across the state and is moving across the borders.  TSTC is looking for ways to partner with the IGNITE/SystemsGo program as it grows.

The learning is entirely project-based.  Students work in teams to design working  hybrid rockets that meet the specifications for each part of the curriculum.  It has been very successful.  To quote Mr. Williams:

This is a whole new way of teaching. We really are working on not just educating our students, but developing them for the workforce. Coming out of this high school program, these students will understand design and development, testing, analysis, and program management - all things the industry needs in the workforce of tomorrow.

Here are some pictures from our trip (warning - low quality iPhone snaps ahead):

Brett Williams (right) in his classroom discussing rocket science with TSTC System Chancellor Dr. Bill Segura.

Another view of the Fredericksburg High School “rocket room.” TSTC Waco President Elton Stuckly is pictured facing the camera next to Dr. Segura. You can see from here that the room is part of an old auditorium which has been divided into rooms.

Redbird 10, designed by high school students,  which will be launched at White Sands.  They are hoping for 100,000 feet.

Redbird 10 fin detail. The legs behind give you an idea of scale.  This a big metal bird.

The nosecone, designed and built by the students, will likely carry a university research payload.

Access to valve area where the N2O (nitrous oxide) oxidizer will be released to facilitate the burning of the otherwise inert solid fuel.  This system is much safer than a standard solid fuel rocket in which the fuel and oxidizer are permanently mixed together.

Failure IS an option!  These are the remains of a rocket that crashed at White Sands, possibly due to a failure in the system which releases the oxidizer.  The students have been doing a failure analysis.

All of the technologies required to build a rocket are vital to the United States as a world power.  Here we see an increasingly rare sight - a real machine shop in a high school.  A consortium of local machine shops also help the students with their projects.

Some thoughts about the program:

• It works.  The students involved are going on to study engineering and engineering technologies in college
• There was a lot of inspiration and determination to do the impossible on the part of Brett Williams
• The Fredericksburg Independent School District and the entire community had great courage and confidence to make this possible
• It can be, and is being replicated

As Mark Long of TSTC Publishing said while we were there, “It would have been a good idea anywhere, but it happened here first for a reason.”  Kudos to those visionaries who were willing to put hard work behind their visions.  Lives are being changed because of it.

*STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

Helen Ginger is the author TSTC Publishing has tapped to write many of the books in our Tech Careers series. There was an article about her last week in the Dallas Examiner with the catchy title, Helen Ginger goes from mermaid to Wonder Woman.  She gives some details about the hard work she puts into researching and writing each one of these books on a three month deadline.

Although I have met a number of our authors, I haven’t had that honor with Ms. Ginger.  She sounds like a very interesting person and she’s also a blogger!

Follow this link for a video explanation from TSTC’s GIS expert Lee Hilliard.

GIS is a very cool and underexposed area of study.  A lot of great jobs are available in the public and private sectors.  In my waning days of teaching database management courses I loved my GIS majors.  I had several distance and hybrid delivery students who were active in the field.  They turned in fascinating projects.

For more information on GIS, start here.  For more on GIS at TSTC, check out this link.

I recently went with a number of my colleagues from TSTC on a visit to the SpaceX rocket test and development center in McGregor, Texas (about 30 miles from TSTC). SpaceX is arguably the leader in commercial space development and having them in our area is quite an honor. As I have mentioned before SpaceX has also hired some of our graduates.

SpaceX chose the McGregor site because it has 14,000 acres that was once a Naval Ordinance site, then a private/military missile test and development site. The acreage and the infrastructure couldn’t be recreated anywhere else economically. For example, the tripod pictured below was built for rocket engine static testing.

My memory is that we were told it had the capacity for up to six million pounds of thrust. I’m not so sure that I heard right. The first state of the Saturn V had a little over seven and a half million pounds of thrust. Since the SpaceX Merlin engine makes around 100,000 pounds of thrust, and their biggest rocket has nine Merlins in the first stage, they should have plenty of room for error!

This tripod was used to test the Merlin 9 last November. It caused quite a stir in the area because it happened after dark and could be heard and felt for many miles. The tripod and tower on top can clearly be seen in the YouTube video of that test:

Other useful ‘leftovers’ at the site include this bunker, now filled with computers (running Windows and National Instruments Labview) to monitor testing.

We also got to look at this airframe stress tester.

I wasn’t sure about snapping the picture. We had been told not to take pictures of things “that looked like they might fly” (especially the engines). Our guide pointed out, though, that this test stand was right next to the road! The rocket is filled with inert liquid nitrogen to test the strength of the whole system. It seems like a good idea not to use the actual liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene for this test.

Speaking of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen, it should come as no surprise that SpaceX has a lot of cryo tanks around the property:

All SpaceX engines are built in California and shipped by truck to Texas. They are tested and assembled into vehicles at the McGregor site. They are sent out from there to the launch sites (like Omelek Island in the Pacific or Cape Canaveral).

Conclusions about technicians from our visit:

• SpaceX has a great need for technicians electrical, mechanical, and aircraft technicians with good computer skills.
• We currently teach almost everything needed for a well-rounded aerospace technician, but we need to rearrange and combine some curriculum.
• These folks work hard long hours. If a test takes 16 hours, they work through it. Dedication and work ethic are very important.

Having been privileged to visit NASA in Houston a couple of times with higher-level status (we got to sit in the REAL shuttle simulator and meet astronauts), I was struck by the difference at SpaceX. Their “Vehicle Assembly Building” is a steel building that looks like any commercial building or barn. They are doing on a shoestring what NASA did with billions. (The picture below came from the Wikipedia article on SpaceX):

Despite the relative lack of resources, we were told that Mars was their ultimate goal. Satellite launches and International Space Station resupply missions are just steps toward that goal. I hope I live to see them make it!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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).

A nice little article is available at Yahoo Education.  It looks like computer support continues to be an area of great demand - an 18% increase.

Via Karen Stevens - thanks!

Popular Mechanics notices the skilled trades shortage:

Only 16 percent of the 1000-plus high schoolers Ridgid interviewed said they had taken or were planning on taking a vocational class in the skilled trades. But once they actually took such a class, the respondents became twice as likely to consider pursuing the trade as a career.

Read the whole thing.

The Texas Comptroller’s Office has released a report called Texas Works 2008: Training and Education for All Texans which has really gotten it right.  Among the important facts in the executive summary:

• Slightly less than 20% of Texas jobs required a Bachelor’s degree in 2007
• 43.65% of the jobs paying better than average salaries do not require a Bachelor’s degree
• More than 343,000 jobs in Texas in 2007 that paid above average were for Associate’s degrees (mostly Associate of Applied Science degrees - technical degrees)
• There were nearly 80,000 jobs that paid above average that could be had with a certificate
• Dwindling enrollment in vocational training is hurting the economy
• We are producing TOO MANY four-year degrees (in the wrong things)

I think that the following graphic really says it all (click to enlarge):

The recommendations made are as follows:

1. Make more parents and students aware of all postsecondary educational options, including career and technical education (CTE), and the availability of financial assistance.
2. As part of this effort, use data on educational and employment outcomes to quantify the economic benefits of CTE, and publicize these results to help make current and prospective students aware of its value and promise.
3. Ensure that state academic requirements, such as those represented by the new “four-by-four” policy and new GPA calculation standards, do not prevent or discourage students from enrolling in career and technology courses.
4. Establish a $25 million Jobs and Education for Texans (JET) fund to provide support for postsecondary CTE courses, including startup funding for new programs.
5. Link any incentive funding for postsecondary technical education to measures that help ensure the state receives a positive return on its investment.

All I can say is HOLY COW  and CUE THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS!!!!!

When the economy enters a downturn, people finally start actually listening to the truth about job skills.  This led to a double digit percentage increase across all TSTC campuses this Spring.  It also leads to news reports that were hard to find in better times.

This is a great piece done in the TSTC Waco welding and mechanical engineering tech labs.

Who knew that pay was linked to marketable skills?  Everyone that knows anything about economics should know it.  Charles Platt has an article in the New York Post about going “undercover” at Wal-Mart.  He discovers that it isn’t the worker’s dungeon that the unions declare it to be, and makes an interesting point about the pay:

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

Read the whole thing.

GREAT article at News 8 in Austin along with video of an interview with our Director for Engineering Technologies along with some students.

UPDATE:  The video doesn’t display correctly in Firefox on my computer.  It works in Internet Explorer.  Take the time to try it.  It really highlights the value of technical training in tough economic times.

It is axiomatic that small business is the critical engine of our economic strength.  The big (”too big to fail”) businesses are in trouble now.  Even the small banks are in pretty good shape since they loaned money to trusted borrowers while building local economies instead of investing in complex derivatives.

Most people don’t realize that career and technical students are very likely to be the small business owners of the future.  They learn a skill and go out and start selling it, build their businesses, hire others, buy equipment, and pursue the American dream unencumbered by huge student loan debts.  The Corsicana Daily Sun has a nice article about a local man that attended the Golf Course & Landscape Management (GLM) program at TSTC and who now runs his own landscaping business with seven full-time employees.

We spend a lot of our time talking with big companies like Chevron, Dell, Bechtel, and Fluor because they employ thousands.  Small business is where most of our grads work, though, and a lot of them are working for themselves.  How cool is it that we were able to help this young man to his dream in a short time for just a little bit of money.  I love what we do!

To see all of the “Joy of Technical Education” series, click here.

Over at the College Affordability and Productivity blog Richard Vedder writes about the “open source” university.  Read the whole thing.  He also gets into the Baylor “gaming” of the U.S. News ratings.  I am more forgiving because gaming is the unfortunate and predictable result of the game college rating has become.

The game itself must end.  I would go along with Vedder’s idea of letting employers judge the quality of education, although it would be anathema to the academy.  Since we are in the “icky” profession of workforce or technical education (’vocational’ having become a bad word), we spend a great deal of our time trying to meet the needs of employers.  As a result, we do meet their expectations and consistently receive high marks from them.  Interestingly, as we strive to meet the needs of industry, our graduates seem to attract more interest from universities seeking to articulate them into four-year degrees.  Perhaps our interests do not diverge as much as some believe.

An open-source university is an interesting idea.  I hear more employers than ever say, “I don’t care what degree they have - I only care about what they can do.”  Their practice and profession do not always match, though, and HR departments can be frightfully conservative regarding paper qualifications.  If the change does come about, it will be driven by sheer desperation for capable employees.  Some companies have already reached that stage.

We recently hosted a delegation from a Norwegian company. As we ate lunch next to the windows looking onto our first class Haas Automation CNC machining lab, one of them asked me why the lab wasn’t full.

We have a very well-respected Mechanical Engineering Technology program and all of the graduates get great jobs. The demand is high, but between our main campus and our teaching site near Houston we graduate fewer than thirty or forty every year. That’s just a drop in an ocean of demand.

Why isn’t our lab full?

TSTC Waco is working with the Nuclear Power Institute to build a workforce for the 8 new reactors planned in Texas. Our particular areas of training for now include radiation safety and digital instrumenation. Nuclear systems maintenance is also something would fit well with our faculty expertise.

Check out this news video about the scholarships and new equipment made possible by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission grant. Kudos to Linda Morris, Environmental Health &
Safety Department Chair, who is interviewed in the video. She is working closely with Linda Martin, Department Chair for Instrumentation, Computerized Controls, & Robotics. It is a great privelege to work with faculty like this who are recognized experts in their fields.

It is also a privelege to be in technical education, helping students get the marketable skills that bring the great jobs and great starting salaries that the video mentions.

I was up in the wee hours fiddling with the Live HTTP Headers add-on for Firefox and ran across an interesting strategy for recruitment of PHP code warriors.  Here is the traffic from the server:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 05:52:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/javascript;charset=utf-8
Connection: close
X-hacker: If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:04:51 GMT
Etag: “6cf3eb5b2155c0a1eddc441898b6ae30″
Content-Length: 2301

So, if you are the kind of person who reads the negotiation between your computer and a web server, you might just be the kind of person that they want to hire!  Follow the instructions and you will find the Automattic website where they are looking for web programming “Code Wranglers.” Contrary to the media narrative*, programmers are still in high demand in the United States.  At TSTC, our Computer Science and Web Design/Development departments are both growing fast.  Their advisory committees are also adding new employers seeking great talent.

Do your own research and don’t believe what ‘everyone knows’ about the job market.

*<rant> I’m not sure what they teach in journalism school these days, but independent thought and investigation don’t seem to be high on the list.  The ‘fish schooling’ behavior by most media outlets is depressing and does not serve the country very well.  No - I’m not talking about politics, I’m talking about the economy, jobs, and the sort of training that leads to marketable job skills (the stuff that I am always talking about). </rant>

UPDATE:  This was noticed and blogged here back in May.

That is what technicians do! This online comic is about the infrastructure that people don’t acknowledge.  The message rings true with me, as I have noted before here and here.

Over at the TSTC Publishing blog, publisher Mark Long posted about the new Biomedical Equipment Technician ‘TechCareers Guide’ that has just come off of the press.  Dr. Roger Bowles, chair of the BET program at TSTC Waco takes lead writing credit with help from several others.  We hope to see a series of these books designed to help those interested in a technical career to get information from experienced practitioners.  You can order a copy of the book, too.

Read the whole thing!