WHERE CAN TECHNOLOGY TAKE YOU? City Tech—Tackling Real-World Challenges
BROOKLYN’S CITY TECH CONTRIBUTES SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTIONS In 2012 Super-Storm Sandy forced New York City officials to address the immediate needs of devastated communities as well as the larger challenge of developing resiliency strategies in preparation for storm surges and other environmental disasters. New models for post-disaster housing that meet the unique needs of a high-density urban environment are needed, and multifamily, multistory solutions that can be placed in residents’ own neighborhoods are preferable to traditional single-family trailers with larger footprints. A group of City Tech (New York City College of Technology) students are contributing their own model as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2015 Solar Decathlon competition. City Tech’s team was selected as one of 20 student teams worldwide to compete in the two-year process to build solar-powered, energy-efficient houses that combine affordability, innovation and design excellence.
The College’s team, called Team DURA (diverse, urban, resilient, and adaptable), has created a novel solution for emergency housing that is uniquely New York. The DURA house is a stackable design to provide relief after catastrophic storms that can also be used for mobile and low-income housing in urban areas. DURA house will consist of several prefabricated modules that can be packaged and shipped in standard-size shipping containers for quick response at low cost. The flexible modules can then be joined in stand-alone configurations or stacked for multifamily solutions. Students involved in the Solar Decathlon come from a wide range of departments at City Tech including Construction Management & Civil Engineering Technology, Mechanical Engineering Technology, Biological Sciences, Chemical Technology, Communication Design, Electrical Engineering Technology, Hospitality Management, Architectural Technology, and Entertainment Technology. City Tech recognizes the advantage of combining realworld experience with classroom learning, so programs are designed to teach students the hands-on, criticalthinking, communication and collaboration skills sought by employers in any field. This approach to higher education helps explain why Team DURA is the only team in the Solar Decathlon competition comprised entirely of undergraduate students.
PARTNERSHIPS ARE KEY City Tech works with its partners to support the evolution of Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle and Downtown Brooklyn. In addition, the College also works with partners in Manhattan and across Brooklyn and will be involved with the training of a skilled workforce in the industrial and manufacturing sections of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Through City Tech’s partners, students have the opportunity to intern at companies that operate in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Goldman Sachs, Honda, Infor, Microsoft, and many other leading corporations. City Tech also partners with a number of organizations that feed those in greatest need and address significant gaps in healthcare. The Department of Vision Care Technology and the Department of Dental Hygiene both operate patient care clinics that provide services to the community.
A HISTORY OF CAREER DEVELOPMENT City Tech has become a major force in the development of skilled graduates ready for the high-tech careers that increasingly define the global economy. During the last decade, City Tech has seen rapid growth in student enrollment, increasing nearly 50 percent since 2003. This increase can be attributed to evolving career demands, new high-tech program development, and the growth of employment opportunities in new and existing firms. With a campus situated in the heart of Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle, City Tech couldn’t be better positioned to offer unparalleled opportunities to its students, its partners and the wider tech industry eager to hire trained professionals with hands-on experience. Founded in 1946, City Tech (New York City College of Technology), of The City University of New York, is the largest public college of technology in the Northeast and a model for technological education. City Tech has an enrollment of more than 17,000 students in 24 baccalaureate and 27 associate degree programs, with approximately 14,000 enrolled in its Division of Continuing Education. There are a few things that set City Tech apart from other technology colleges: faculty with ties to industry, active partnerships and advisory boards, state-of-the-art labs, access to internships, and a diverse learning environment—all of which add up to meaningful career opportunities. And for students and families facing increasing tuition, rising debt and a weak job market, it is no surprise that job placement after earning a degree is priority number one.
Through City Tech’s partners, students have the opportunity to intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory, at companies that operate in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as at Goldman Sachs, Honda, Infor, Microsoft, and many other leading corporations.
The College is committed to a policy of equal employment and equal access in its educational programs and activities and to non-discrimination in accordance with federal, state and city laws. For questions or concerns on non-discrimination, please contact the College’s Chief Diversity Officer; for those regarding sex discrimination and sexual misconduct, please contact the College’s Title IX Coordinator or the Office of Civil Rights of the United States.
RESEARCH THAT ADDRESSES REAL-WORLD CHALLENGES City Tech’s outstanding faculty—many recruited from business, industry and the professions—provide students with the benefit of their extensive knowledge and real-world experience. Faculty members play a leading role as the College meets the challenge of preparing students for increasingly important green/ sustainable technologies, for the constantly transforming areas of digital technologies, and for technologies in the health fields.
In the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the death rate from diabetes is nine times higher than for the general New York City population. Professor Kathleen Falk, a faculty member in City Tech’s Nursing Department, is working to change those numbers for Brownsville residents and, ultimately, in other communities affected by poverty.
After Super-Storm Sandy ravaged the Northeast, Illya Azaroff, an associate professor in the Department of Architectural Technology at City Tech, founded the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Regional Recovery Working Group to re-imagine a more resilient and sustainable region.
Falk is part of a team that received a New York City Schools Coalition grant, which enabled PS 184, a public school in Brownsville, to be designated a “Community Learning School.” Community Learning Schools are public schools that collaborate with service organizations—and, in this case, an institution of higher education—to support the academic, health, and social service needs of children, their families, and communities.
Recently, Azaroff’s Recovery Working Group, which includes former City Tech students, received the AIA National Component Excellence Award for Knowledge Sharing Initiatives at the Grassroots Leadership Conference in Washington, DC.
One of the goals of a Community Learning School is to provide “wrap-around” services for students and their families that focus on holistic interventions from neonatal care through childhood, and from adolescence into adulthood. Falk and her nursing students are providing parenting classes and health and nutrition classes, with a special focus on incoming Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten families.
Azaroff has been recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on resilience by the federal government. He was invited to participate in a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Disaster Recovery Workshop, organized by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response under the Obama Administration, to contribute to the National Disaster Recovery Framework development. In 2014, Azaroff was the recipient of the Young Architects Award from the AIA.
The nursing students not only gain valuable real-life experience at the Community Learning School and FirstStepsNYC, they also learn how to connect those experiences to the theoretical readings and discussions they have in class. In addition, nurse training that combines healthcare and education is now more critical than ever as many nurses will be required to make home visits—a change brought about by the Affordable Care Act.
City Tech’s Architectural Technology program is the largest of its kind in the United States and offers the type of hands-on experience students in a traditional architecture program rarely receive. Because faculty members at City Tech—in this department and others—collaborate on interdisciplinary research projects that include student participation, learning transcends disciplinary boundaries.
Jean Claude, a professor in the Hospitality Management Department, has won numerous culinary awards and has worked at some of the most wellknown restaurants and hotels in the New York City area. His current research, however, has taken Claude back to Haiti, his birthplace, where he is leading a CUNY-wide initiative to develop a two-year associate degree program in hospitality and tourism education at the Public University in the North at Cap-Haitian (UPNCH). “For the tourism sector in Haiti, educated and trained workers are rare, so the service sector is relatively mediocre and expensive. The applied and comprehensive curriculum of the hospitality management program at UPNCH is designed specifically to fill this void with qualified people and to assist in the tourism development of the country,” says Claude. A year after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Claude led a successful UPNCH summer certificate program, through which ninety percent of the 300 graduates quickly found employment in the hospitality or tourism industry. The UPNCH associate program opened in 2012, and the first class of 44 students graduated in March 2015. Three additional cohorts are on track to complete their studies. Claude continues to teach in the program, recently taking two City Tech Hospitality Management student interns to provide classroom assistance.
EXPANSION OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMS AT CITY TECH City Tech’s degree programs provide a rare blend of specialized technological instruction and broad education in the liberal arts and sciences. Many of these programs are offered nowhere else within the CUNY system or in the New York metropolitan area. Recently introduced baccalaureate programs or program options in applied mathematics, biomedical informatics, emerging media technologies, and radiologic sciences, electrical engineering technology, professional and technical writing, and construction management among others, not only help meet the urgent need for skilled professionals in these areas, but are also attracting record numbers of transfer students and enabling more of the College’s associate degree program graduates to continue their education here. City Tech’s newest bachelor’s degree program in applied chemistry, awaiting New York State approval, will create another exciting career path in a number of expanding high-tech fields. City Tech provides students with the latest technology: More space is dedicated to laboratories than traditional classrooms. Students have access to high-end 3-D printers in Architectural Technology and Mechanical Engineering Technology, simulation labs in the Department of Nursing, a mechatronics lab for the engineering programs, information security technology in the Department of Computer Systems Technology and a super computer in the Department of Physics. Last year, City Tech broke ground on the construction of a new 365,000 square foot state-of-the-art academic complex at the corner of Tillary and Jay Streets in Downtown Brooklyn. The complex will provide students with innovative laboratories with cutting-edge technology.
TOBiAS
(Tele-Operated Bi-Manual Augmented System), a virtual reality-style immersive experience that allows human input to dictate the movement of a remote robotic torso. Watch TOBiAS on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOjTLHuThac
PATHWAYS TO CAREERS Matthew Zagada, Ben Miftari and Pedro Ferreira, Communication Design students at City Tech, participated in UniWorld’s (UWG) research workshop known as Culture Labs. UWG’s partnership with City Tech offers students the opportunity to actively research culture and share the information learned with UWG clients, potential clients and other industry insiders. Miftari says that UWG offers a “different paradigm” when it comes to internships. “It’s an intense hands-on experience in which we have a lot of input; we’re not treated like interns at all.”
Photographed by Tina Remiz
City Tech’s student population brings the diversity that advertising firms are seeking as their strategies to reach a broad consumer base become more sophisticated. Jared Carethers, creative director, UWG Culture Labs, says that the partnership with City Tech has already produced groundbreaking data and content that has been used by the agency’s partners and clients. “When you think about the heritage of our department as a hands-on education in creative problem solving, this partnership is an extension of the classroom,” says City Tech Professor Douglas Davis. “Relevance is key and influences everything about the way we introduce design problems to students. It is a pleasure to see the fruit of our efforts within the Communication Design Department expressed through our students in the industry.”
The City Tech team developed TOBiAS (Tele-Operated Bi-Manual Augmented System), a virtual reality-style immersive experience that allows human input to dictate the movement of a remote robotic torso. The Control Unit is the heart of TOBiAS and is a wearable control mechatronic device in which the user sits and is able to control the robot. Applications include nuclear clean-up, explosive handling and disposal, and exploration of unknown territories. The team and their faculty advisor credit City Tech’s Mechatronics Technology Center (MTC), where they had access to state-ofthe-art technology, for providing the tools needed to create their design. “The MTC, funded by the National Science Foundation, created a platform for students from different engineering fields to collaborate, and that, in part, made it possible for the TOBiAS team to win the top prize,” says Professor Andy Zhang, Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology.
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Diversity matters in a global marketplace, and companies that care about fostering a diverse work environment recruit students from City Tech. Students and faculty from more than 120 countries and speaking more than 85 languages help to create and sustain an exceptional learning environment. For the last fifteen years, U.S. News & World Report has cited City Tech as among the leaders in the diversity of the students it serves and recently in new student retention. City Tech’s mission focuses on preparing a technically proficient workforce and well-educated citizens. The College’s offerings encompass the pre-professional, professional and technical programs that respond to regional economic needs and provide access to higher education for all who seek fulfillment of career and economic goals through education.
City Tech relationships make it possible for students to participate in international competitions. The Digilent Design Contest is an international hardware design competition open to students who are passionate about electronics, digital design and electrical engineering in general.
The 51 degree programs offered allow graduates to pursue careers in the architectural and engineering technologies, the computer, entertainment and health professions, human services, advertising and publishing, hospitality, business and law-related professions, as well as programs in career and technical teacher education.
Last year, students Eugene Babkin, Bijan Mokhtari, and Angjelo Kuka won first place in the regional Digilent Design competition. With that win they earned the opportunity to compete in the Digilent Design Worldwide Contest in Shanghai, China, where they again took first place against strong international competition.
In essence, the College’s programs are geared to the needs of our students, the professions we support and the commerce that drives our economy.
WHERE CAN TECHNOLOGY TAKE YOU? At City Tech, the possibilities are endless.
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FALL DIRECT ADMISSION 2015 For more information, visit: www.citytech.cuny.edu/directadmission NEW YORK CITY COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY
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