This first Workforce Wednesday had Kurt Zierhut from Haas Automation and Martin McGill from Allendale Machinery Systems talk about many important topics pertaining to the manufacturing and machining industries. One of the really nice points that I appreciated hearing from both of these industry leaders was their introductions of how they got to where they are in their careers. Both spoke about staying determined, hard working and willing to take up any and every chance to learn something new. Mr. McGill started his career in high school by working labor for a forestry company which eventually led him to work in manufacturing forestry equipment and then ultimately buying the business and becoming a predominant machining company that formed an early and close relationship with Haas Automation. Mr. Zierhut went to school and took every opportunity to learn the new technologies such as programming and working with robots in the 1970s, which allowed him to help Gene Haas create a manufacturing equipment company that would become the top of its industry. Both of these mens' stories remind me of some of the steps that I have started to take, with my summer job being a plumber’s apprentice, focusing my high school career on taking as many engineering and technology courses as possible, and looking to spend next summer either back to learning plumbing or working in machining and manufacturing. This Workforce Wednesday was a very influential and amazing experience.

This second Workforce Wednesday had Harold King and Johnnieanne Hansen from Council of Industry talk about many important topics pertaining to the manufacturing industry and businesses in New York state. Together they answered questions about what the Council of Industry is as an organization, what they have seen change in the manufacturing industry over the past 30 years, and important factors and tips to enter the industry. The Council of Industry is a local organization founded in 1910 that has partnered with hundreds of different companies across the state to aid them in their manufacturing needs, everything from recruiting and training employees to networking and consulting. Similar to the answers from the previous Workforce Wednesday, Mr. King and Mrs. Hansen both described how manufacturing has seen huge changes in past years with becoming cleaner, safer, higher paying and more efficient. In fact, Mr. King commented by saying that manufacturing based in New York state today has half the amount of workers and up to four times as much output from 30 years ago when he entered manufacturing. I also got the opportunity to ask both Mr. King and Mrs. Hansen about when and how we could enter the industry, especially in my instance of wanting to go to university and pursue a manufacturing degree while also preferring the more hands-out, skilled labor that is more commonly lower on the manufacturing ladder. I learned that no matter how many degrees I do or don’t have or when I enter manufacturing, there will most certainly be a business or organization that will work with me to get any training or the job that I need. Above all else, one of the best parts of the meet that summed up the needs for the manufacturing industry is for people that “love to learn”, which gives me comfort knowing that there is a future home for me in manufacturing if I want it.

The first Monday Motivators meeting, or the reincarnation of Workforce Wednesday, was with two Pine Bush graduates, Thomas Orr and Tess Meier. Although there were various topics talked about throughout the meeting, I noticed that most of the time both Thomas and Tess were either directly or indirectly talking about their experiences with internships and work. They also gave good advice on how to start networking both now and throughout college and how it plays a major role in getting internships, work experience and a job out of college. Thomas described how he began college at Columbia University interested in concentrating on automotive engineering, which eventually led to him getting an internship with Tesla in California. After interning at Tesla for over seven months, Thomas realized that he wasn’t as interested in the automotive industry as he thought, citing that he wanted to have a bigger part as an individual in exploring and solving new problems. This led to him finding and being hired at a Boston start-up company that is leading innovations in 3D printing and manufacturing, FormLabs. On the other hand, Tess went through most of college at WPI focusing on Bioengineering, but a small interest in programming and robotics led her to enrolling into her college’s entry-level robotics course as a junior. She realized that she was really interested in robotics following the course, and finished her bachelors in bioengineering and then got her masters in robotics the following year. She didn’t forget about bioengineering though, as she also fell in love with the laboratory at her college and spent much of her senior year interning and doing work for the lab. Tess is currently working at Delsys, Inc. as a research engineer, honing skills she learned from both bioengineering and robotics to crunch data from specialized sensors placed on the human body to track movement. As she described it, “Humans are just really complicated robots”. Both Thomas and Tess’s experiences throughout college and now in the workforce are really informative and definitely gave me more insight on what to look for in internships and how to choose what industry I want to pursue once I graduate out of college.

This week’s Monday Motivator featured Mr. Marshall’s brother Lawrence Marshall, a civil engineer and co-owner of MNTM Engineering and Surveying in Pine Bush, and his sister Becki Rosenfeldt, a civil and environmental engineer working for Hazen and Sawyer. While the Marshall family, all of whom graduated from Pine Bush Central School District, talked about many topics, some of which similar to previous Monday Motivators and Workforce Wednesday meetings, two topics that stood out was the focus on technical writing and making sure that engineering , or any field for that matter, is a passion of yours early on. The first point that both Larry and Becki talked about rather early on was technical writing skills, or the ability to write clearly, concisely and grammatically correct in a professional manner. This skill matters greatly in any professional setting, but is extremely important in engineering and higher-technical fields for two reasons: professionalism and the nature of details. It was these two points that Larry really hit home with, he mentioned that he had turned down meeting with a former student of Mr. Marshall, because of the first email that the student had sent him. The email was full of grammatical errors and was not very professional nor informative, which Larry simply said that for his business and almost any other, they would not be wasting their time on someone who lacks the simple skill of being able to articulate information, whether it be about a job position or the schematics of a building site. Larry and Becki both also stated numerous times that engineers are almost always very nerdy and love details (Becki is a self-proclaimed “dork”), and technical writing is a necessary skill in order to translate well within the industry and with other engineers. The second main point that I got out of the Monday Motivator was to try to find out, as quickly as possible, if engineering or any STEAM field is the one you really want to focus on and find a career in. This is because rather than go into the workforce or study for four years in college, only to find out that you hate the nature of the job, it would save you time, money and stress to find out early on. In order to do this, Larry and Becki stressed getting internships or jobs as early on as possible, either before or during college, to get real world, albeit low-level, experience in the industry. This Monday Motivator was very interesting for these reasons, and it was very cool to meet Mr. Marshall’s siblings who also happen to love the STEAM field and are successful in the career and life.