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Mission accomplished
With the opening of the George B. Duke Engineering and Information Technologies Building, Pitt-Bradford has been able to launch a program leaders have sought for more than 30 years – a baccalaureate engineering degree.
By KIMBERLY WEINBERG
Hundreds Gathered for the dedication of the George B. Duke Engineering and Information Technologies Building in March at an event that hearkened back to industry partnerships with the University of Pittsburgh that brought the campus into being in the first place.
The new building is named in honor of George B. Duke, owner of Zippo Manufacturing Co. and the third generation of his family to generously support Pitt-Bradford.
He and other industry leaders spoke about the building and the innovative programs it houses –mechanical engineering technology, energy engineering technology and computer information systems and technology – as crucial for the future of manufacturing in the region.
“Our equipment wears out,” he said in his talk to the industry, community and university leaders gathered for the dedication. “When a piece wears out, there are a lot of things we consider. The pieces that come in are very, very complicated, and they take engineers to keep running, and that’s not just at Zippo.”
As experienced baby boomers retire, manufacturers are concerned about attracting new workers with the technical skills needed in modern industry.
“The problem we have is an economic problem,” Rick Esch, president of Pitt-Bradford, said to a group of executives from Zippo the previous month on a tour of the building. “These programs give the region an opportunity for us to grow our own workers with the knowledge and skills needed.”
With that in mind, Pitt-Bradford worked with local industries when designing its two new engineering technology majors. Launching those majors, which enrolled their first students last fall, required the construction of the $24.5 million, 40,000 square-foot building where students cannot only design items, but also fabricate and evaluate them.
Dr. Matt Kropf, associate professor of engineering technology, designed the two new engineering technology programs and serves as the director of the Harry R. Halloran Jr./ARG Energy Institute.
“I knew this outcome was inevitable from before my career even started,” Kropf said at the dedication, telling a story about how, at his job interview 12 years before, Harry R. Halloran, the late owner of American Refining Group Inc. mentioned starting a four-year engineering program. Dr. Richard E. McDowell, former president and president emeritus of Pitt-Bradford, followed up by taking Kropf by the arm at the first reception he attended, and told him about the need. And he heard it from industry leaders for 12 years.
Drawing up the blueprint
Pitt-Bradford had had a two-year engineering program since its founding and continued to have a successful two-year program that gave young engineers a smaller and more personalized start to their careers. Despite the decades-long interest by Bradford leaders in starting a four-year program at the Bradford campus, approval did not come from the University of Pittsburgh to build a new program until about seven years ago.
It was a move from focusing on engineering – designing and developing items – to engineering technology – dealing with the direct application of technology – that cleared a path for Pitt to approve a four-year program on the Bradford campus in 2016.
Kropf had written the new curricula while consulting with others. One of the people Kropf and others consulted with was Chris Napoleon ’86-’88, who had been one of those students who went on to finish his four-year degree at the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
Napoleon used his Pitt degree to start Napoleon Engineering Services in his garage in 1997. Today, the company employs more than 50 people who service the global aerospace, agriculture, renewable energy, drive train and racing industries. NES specializes in manufacturing custom bearings and inspecting and testing bearings. NES is a premier supplier in the com- mercial space market, where its bearings are used in critical propulsion systems.
Napoleon has also been involved in the Pitt-Bradford Alumni Association, served two terms as its president and served on the Pitt-Bradford Advisory Board.
“I got asked a lot of questions by (then-president) Dr. (Livingston) Alexander and others on the cabinet about my opinions for the need in the region and whether I felt that a four-year engineering program could be successful,” he said. “My responses were always that industry has a need and that it would be successful, but that we just needed to get the engagement of the manufacturing base.”
Napoleon met with Kropf about the curriculum and compared it to other curricula that he knew were similar and successful at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology and Alfred (N.Y.) State College. Napoleon employs 10 engineers from the latter who have been successful in his business.
“I knew that if Pitt-Bradford would go down this path, that our region would benefit,” he said, adding that even with the program at Alfred (N.Y.) State, there are enough high school students interested in engineering to fill it and definitely enough employers interested in hiring them.
“We need to develop our employment base from within our communities,” he said. “It’s much easier to engage a young person and share with them the great things that we do with our advanced manufacturing in our region than to bring engineers in from Pittsburgh or other schools.”
Constructing a program
Skip forward a half dozen years to the opening of the Duke Building in January and the first engineering students who are in the building most of the 17 hours a day that it is open.
They are writing manuals for the equipment in the machine shop; they are helping Kropf and President Rick Esch give tours to donors, industry leaders and educators; they are working on a go-kart in the student innovation project lab; and they are studying in the common spaces of the two-story triangular atrium at the center of the building.
From the atrium, students also can see what is happening in the glass-walled makerspace and fabrication lab and an industrial-grade machine shop beyond or grab one of the small-group study rooms warmed by the sun each morning. In the afternoons and evenings, students from all majors (especially pre-medicine) fill the rooms, where they can cover a whiteboard with diagrams of the cell or plug their computer into a large wall display to work on a project together.
The students are not the only ones enjoying the new building. Dr. Michael Liu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering technology, was excited about the new fluid mechanics lab. “It’s very exciting because it’s very rare that you get to build a lab from nothing.”
As part of their studies, engineering technology students are taking technical calculus and hands-on classes with labs in machine shop, electrical technology, fluid mechanics, strength of materials, computer-aided design, manufacturing and more. Classes are structured less around theory and more around applications.
“Our students will know not only how to design something, but they will also understand how it is manufactured and the ma- chines that something is manufactured on,” Kropf said.
For many students, this firsthand method of learning is a big part of the attraction of Pitt-Bradford, as is another attribute baked into Pitt-Bradford academics: small classes.
Junior Mychal Berlinski, an energy engineering technology major from nearby Allegany, N.Y., also spoke at the building’s dedication, telling the story of how he graduated from high school into the pandemic and attending a large aerospace engineering program online.
In his sophomore year, Berlinski was able to attend classes in person, but he couldn’t always make it to faculty office hours for extra help, and there were 265 students in his Physics II class.
“I wasn’t ready to fail out of engineering just yet,” he said. He turned for advice to a friend’s dad, Chris Napoleon, who told him about the new program at Pitt-Bradford, where he enrolled.
“Very quickly I realized this was a lot different,” Berlinski said. “Everyone went at their own pace. My 265-person class went to a dozen. I felt like I could raise my hand any time I had a question.”
The products
The final products of this endeavor are not just an exciting building and meaningful employment for young technically minded people. The Duke Building and the engineering programs that occupy it will make possible the highly educated workforce that area manufacturers cannot exist without.
Timothy Van Horn is the executive vice president of operations at Zippo. “This is exactly what we need in this area,” he said of the engineering technology programs. “Some of the newer technology meshed with the traditional is fantastic.”
Van Horn is anxious for Zippo to begin hosting interns from the programs – so anxious in fact that the company hired its first mechanical engineering technology intern from Pitt-Bradford in the spring semester and kept him on for the summer.
Interns are attractive, Van Horn explained, because it gives a company a chance to see how they collaborate with their peers and suppliers under pressure. “At times, projects don’t go as planned,” Van Horn said. “We want to know how these young engineers are going to interact.”
Zippo currently employs several dozen engineers, and Van Horn said automating areas of its manufacturing are part of its strategic plan. As technical workers with years of experience retire, the company will be looking for employees who can program and work with automation equipment and understand their capabilities and limitations.
Kropf is seeing a lot of enthusiasm from others across the local manufacturing sector. He said that when giving a tour of the facility, the chief executive officer will often hand him, or even a student met along the way, a business card.
“For CEOs to be handing out their personal business cards is a sign,” he said.
Another Pitt-Bradford program helping area employers has moved into the Duke Building alongside the new engineering technology programs: computer information systems and technology.
It is a program with a similar ethos of innovation, collaboration and just having fun tinkering with technology. Some members of the information technology adjunct faculty have day jobs working in the university’s Computing, Telecommunications and Media Services Office, which also has moved into a spacious new home in the Duke Building.
The information technology graduates are now staffing, sometimes entirely, the technology services of local industries both in and out of the manufacturing sector. Pitt-Bradford information technology graduates are critical to the operation of not just McKean County’s largest, Zippo, but also hospitals, schools, government offices and the university itself, where all the employees of the CTM office are also alumni.
