On a blustery Thursday morning, Metropolitan Community College’s Michael Guericke was making a clock. A huge clock. A ginormous clock. A 100-square-foot clock, with the largest gear five feet in diameter pushing a seven-foot long arm. He wanted to hang it in the hallway of MCC’s new Center for Advanced and Emerging Technology. In the software, it looked perfect. In physical reality, it warped on him.
Curt Brannon, founder and CEO of Sympateco—a manufacturer that supplies national franchises such as Sport Clips and Complete Nutrition with cabinetry and other items—had some questions for Guericke. What was the material? Was it seven-ply plywood? Could you see into the back of the clock?
“You might have to go with ApplePly,” Brannon said. “That stuff is super dense.”
This brief, technical exchange could serve as a microcosm for a day at the Center for Advanced and Emerging Technology (CAET) at MCC’s Fort Omaha campus.
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CAET is a 9,600 square foot flexible learning center and prototyping lab housing 3D printers, 3D scanners, computer-numerical-controlled plasma cutters, laser cutters, vinyl cutters, mills, and other devices necessary for prototyping. It is also a magnet for industry partnerships and business co-location.
Opened in 2017, the CAET represents a unique partnership between higher education and industry. At CAET, industry professionals work side-by-side with students and MCC faculty to bring prototypes to life, from design to construction and evaluation. Students develop a highly in-demand skillset—prototyping, or the development of real-life models to test and evaluate designs—through hands-on experience with state-of-the-art technology and contemporary workflow design.
In return, industry partners receive office space and the chance to spot, nurture, and recruit future talent.
For the past two years, Sympateco has maintained a key presence in CAET, devoting resources and people to nurture students in MCC’s prototype design degree. Now they are building a Mini-Sympateco Prototype Lab in a wing of CAET.
The collaboration between Sympateco and MCC students has been priceless, said Dr. Thomas Pensabene, associate vice president of workforce and IT innovation at MCC.
At CAET, Sympateco works with students to take designs through the entire manufacturing process, from hand sketch to engineering to prototyping to delivering finished products to the actual stores Sympateco supplies in Omaha.
“We teach students about how we approve work on our end, so they get that real life component,” said Mary Smolsky, vice president of Sympateco. “It helps that the whole program is centered around getting the finished product. Not just design, not just engineering, not just manufacturing, but how does it all tie together.”
The company’s partnership with MCC has benefited both students and Sympateco: recently, Sympateco hired a student they’d mentored for the past year.
“We’ve already had enough experience with her, and enough interaction, to understand more about who she is and the core of what she represents to know that weaving her into Sympateco is going to line up with what we want to do,” Smolsky said. “We just feel like she’ll be able to do a lot for us.”
Sympateco’s experience with the student-turned-new-hire fast-tracked the hiring process, Smolsky added.
Companies can get a better sense of a potential hire’s capabilities from the kind of collaborative relationship facilitated through the CAET than they can through a half-hour interview. In that way, CAET could become a kind of farm-team system for Sympateco, Brannon said.
Moreover, the relationship between Sympateco and CAET represents a sea-change in education: a shift toward practical experience, and a celebration of the respectability of the trades.
“The world for so long has kind of pulled away from the idea that people can actually sustain life with a trade,” Brannon said. “And that bothers me. That really bothers me.”
Companies that would like to consider co-locating at CAET should contact Dr. Thomas Pensabene at tpensabene@mccneb.edu.
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Tom McCauley is digital content production manager at AIM Institute, as well as a writer, comedian, musician and artist.
