ImaginePlastics.com Believes in Behrend
Students, alumni and faculty from the plastics engineering technology program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, are prominently featured on a new career development Web site that encourages creative high school students to consider a future in plastics.
ImaginePlastics.com emphasizes the industry’s entrepreneurial spirit. “Our most successful students are the people who can interact, who can be creative,” John Beaumont, program chair of the college’s two- and four-year plastics engineering technology degrees, says on video shown in the site’s Parents section. “Those are the students who go out and develop and design new things, new technologies, and solve problems that other people could not solve.”
The twin themes of innovation and exploration are carried over in ImaginePlastics.com’s eight Meet the People video profiles, five of which spotlight Penn State Behrend students or alumni. In his profile, Jason Williams reassures high school students that his love for taking things apart to figure out how they work trumped his average math grades. Williams founded K Development shortly after his 1992 graduation from Penn State Behrend; K designs plastic components for new products, primarily in the toy and auto racing industries. Working with toy companies is lucrative and interesting, Williams says, but racing is his passion. “Reverse engineering car components to remake them in stronger materials allows me to exercise my hobby while I work,” he adds, noting that his designs are used at the sport’s highest levels.
Alicyn Haney Rhoades, a 2001 graduate, relates that as an undergraduate she discovered that she loved the science of plastics; ImaginePlastics.com interviews her in a lab at University of Southern Mississippi where she is a doctoral candidate in polymer sciences.
Lynzie Collard, a Penn State Behrend junior, is interviewed at her internship at Bausch & Lomb, where she worked with a design engineering team to find and make improvements to the company’s existing contact lens products. Because of growing demand, Collard characterized plastics as a major that will never limit her occupation or geographic choices—“I’m prepared for anything, and I get to pick,” she says to prospective plastics majors.
Tiffany Beers tells the Web site that she loves not having to pick a single occupation—her title of “innovator” at Nike’s Beaverton, Ore., headquarters means that she is a product designer, developer or engineer, depending on the day or assignment. Beers says that her favorite part of her job is developing a new footwear product, and personally testing it on the court or field. “If it doesn’t work, then I modify it and try again,” she says, noting that she was able to patent the interchangeable airbag system she designed for Nike’s Jordan 21 line. Beers earned her B.S. in plastics engineering technology at Penn State Behrend in 2002.
ImaginePlastics.com also interviewed 2007 graduate Mikael Wagner, who engineered toy car designs created by local middle school students for an annual race sponsored by the college’s School of Engineering. Wagner says that a high school field trip to Erie Plastics in Corry inspired his interest in the field.
The ImaginePlastics.com site was created using a grant awarded by the President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. It is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, and Pennsylvania Workforce Development.
The School of Engineering at Penn State Behrend offers three associate and seven baccalaureate degree programs, as well as one minor. Students have access to 11 student chapters of honorary and professional organizations, such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The School of Engineering and the Sam and Irene Black School of Business are co-located in the college’s $30 million, 160,000-square-foot Research and Economic Development Center, making Penn State Behrend one of the first institutions of higher education in the country to house its engineering and business schools together in the same facility.