For much of my childhood I didn’t want to be in school, probably like most people. But now I am trying to get back into several schools as a guest speaker to show students my STEM project and how it relates to my great career that I had in manufacturing. It is important to show the students that manufacturing and engineering is an awesome career choice.

Almost every school that I visit has the same message for me. That message is you are the first manufacturing person to ever come to the classroom. How is an industry supposed to recruit workers at the high school level, when they haven’t been exposed to the industry at all in middle school? I discovered this back in 2015 when I assisted at a high school career fair for the day. Out of the one thousand students that came through the event that day, I only had ten students that had any interest in manufacturing. That is one percent of the students that were engaged in manufacturing.

After that experience I then decided to make a spectacular device for promoting STEM in technical education classrooms. That device is a 3D printed mechanical clock machine. After over three thousand hours of my time, it is complete. I spent about fifteen hundred hours researching clocks and engineering the device, and over one thousand hours were spent printing parts. The remaining time was spent figuring out clearances and spacing the parts for a smooth movement.

I now travel with the device throughout Wisconsin to visit technical education classrooms to give presentations as a guest speaker. This is an extremely important thing for me to do because I tell the students that if they like the STEM project that they would possibly like to work in the manufacturing industry and that there are many career opportunities and roles that are available to explore. From engineering to production to jobs that support the production of parts.