Laser-electro-optic technicians Davian Tevault, Tyler Dumbacher, and Ryland Plummer work in different parts of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tevault and Dumbacher characterize and align the injection laser system at the National Ignition Facility. Plummer works in the test chamber pictured here.

Timing can be everything. And the success of three young graduates of Indian Hills Community College (IHCC) indicates its Laser and Optic Technology program is in sync with the ways teenagers think at key decision points.

Davian K. Tevault, Tyler Dumbacher, and Ryland Plummer landed in the introductory laser course at Columbia Area Career Center because it had openings, and other courses were already full when they scheduled their sophomore classes. They became friends while taking classes and residing in dorms at IHCC. After graduating with associate degrees in 2014, the three moved together to take jobs as laser-electro-optic technicians at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

The scheduling alignment was serendipitous for three guys who at the time had no postsecondary plans. However, the dual enrollment photonics program at their high school and IHCC's College Immersion Experience for juniors and seniors are the quite intentional results of National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grants to the Midwest Photonics Education Center (MPEC) at IHCC and the National Center for Optics and Photonics Education (OP-TEC).

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At ATE Central, part of our goal is to help community members stay current with educational news, facts, and figures. Below is a selection of five resources we felt were worth a closer look. Whether you are looking for material to help as you write up a report, create an informative presentation, or if you just want to stay up-to-date about news, events, and opportunities central to community and technical college education, we hope you find this list helpful.

American Association of Community Colleges: DataPoints

From the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), DataPoints are a collection of printable snapshots on a range of topics, including degree completion rates, enrollment trends, student attitudes, and projected demographics of high school graduates over the next fifteen years. For instance, one recently published snapshot reveals how well students felt their experience in higher education prepared them for the workforce. Another DataPoint provides information about student completion rates for remedial coursework. Easy to read and attractively presented, these DataPoints offer a helpful resource for use in meetings, presentations, or even grant applications.

See http://www.createenergy.org/workshops.html for information about attending the STEM Educator Solar Institute at Madison College in July, or Shoreline Community College in August.

The Center for Renewable Energy Advanced Technical Education (CREATE) will have unique instructional opportunities with the installation of the largest solar energy system in Wisconsin at Madison Area Technical College (Madison College).

"It will be great because our students will be able to work on the installation itself [in 2018], and they will do the ongoing operations and maintenance over the next 20 to 30 years," said Kenneth A. Walz, CREATE's principal investigator and an instructor of chemistry and engineering at Madison College. The educators from across the country who attend the STEM Educator Solar Institute offered by CREATE, an Advanced Technological Education national support center, will also benefit from it.

With the growth of renewable energy jobs, CREATE added a second Solar Institute for summer 2017. There are still openings for the free three-day workshop in July at Madison College, and in August at Shoreline Community College in Shoreline, Washington. See http://www.createenergy.org/workshops.html for more information.

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Based at The University of Texas' College of Education, the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCSSE) focuses on research related to student engagement at community and technical colleges.  Their deep commitment to improving educational quality and student success produces research data and reports that can and should inform the work being done by those of us in the ATE community. These include a number of initiatives that focus on qualitative research as well as various national reports, which are disseminated broadly to a wide variety of audiences including educators, education researchers and organizations, and the media.

A good example of the excellent work being done by the Center is a recent report titled Even One Semester:  Full-Time Enrollment and Student Success. This report explores data and correlations between levels of attendance, student experiences, and related issues like completion.   The report is a pleasure to read and is filled with graphics, quotes, and photos that help contextualize the data and ground the research in the reality of today’s community college environment.

Navneel Dutt and other Clark State Community College interns work through cybersecurity challenges during a Hack-a-Thon in the summer of 2016.

Navneel Dutt was unsure what Cathryn S. Balas meant last June when she told him and 11 other Clark State Community College students that their cybersecurity internships funded by a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grant would "open doors" for them.

By mid-summer Dutt had a better understanding of the opportunities that could come from his internship at AT&T Government Solutions. There he worked on a research project with two other Clark State interns and a high school teacher extern. He liked learning in a work environment so much that he applied for other internships. During the 2016-17 academic year he did three other paid, employer-sponsored internships while attending classes full time.

Four weeks after his May 6 graduation where he received two associate degrees—in cybersecurity and computer networking—Dutt will embark on his fifth internship in 12 months. This one at the prestigious Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, is the pinnacle of undergraduate work experiences. He hopes the 10-week internship at the Department of Energy lab will strengthen his resume and boost his prospects for landing a federal government job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base when he returns home to Springfield, Ohio, in August.

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Earlier this year, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, a division of the National Science Foundation, released the 2017 Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering report. This formal report, now in the form of a digest, is issued every two years and examines the degree to which women, people with disabilities, and people who identify as black, Hispanic and American Indian or Alaska Native are underrepresented in Science and Engineering (S&E) education and employment. 

The digest is best read online, where an interactive format invites readers to explore trends in greater depth through detailed data tables and graphics. Technical notes and other online resources aid in interpreting the data. Data tables are also available as both PDFs or Excel files, allowing for easy viewing, printing or downloading for further analysis.

Key findings suggest that women have reached a state of relative parity with men in academic achievement, but not as part of the S&E workforce. As the digest indicates, since the late 1990s, women have earned about half of S&E bachelor's degrees. However, their representation varies widely by field, ranging from 70% in psychology to 18% in computer sciences, for example. In addition, at every educational level, underrepresented minority women earn a higher proportion of degrees than their male counterparts. White women, however, earn fewer degrees than their male counterparts.

Perseverance and civility are among the soft skills that Mica A. Welsh (left foreground) brought to Forsyth Tech when she switched careers. Welsh's employer, Patti Shugart, chief operating officer of Carolina Liquid Chemistries (right), explained at the 2016 ATE Principal Investigators Conference that she focuses on job candidates' soft skills during interviews. (Photo by James Tkatch)

Driving a semitrailer truck cross country for a dozen years helped Mica A. Welsh tackle challenging math problems as a 44-year-old biotechnology student.

"If you kill a truck when you are trying to turn through an intersection, you've got a choice to make ... You can either get out of the truck and cry, try to find your way home. Or you can push the clutch in and re-start the truck and go on down the road," Welsh said.

Taking her first chemistry class at Forsyth Technical Community College (Forsyth Tech) in 2004 while still using oxygen as she recovered from a serious respiratory illness, Welsh wasn't sure she was smart enough to pursue a new career in biotechnology, but she was intrigued and determined.

"I was the first one there; the last one to leave. And I would come by the [professor's] office and ask questions, and really push it. I wasn't giving up," said Welsh, who is now regulatory affairs manager at Carolina Liquid Chemistries in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Stubbornness—that's what Welsh calls it—helped her earn associate in applied science, bachelor's and master's degrees.

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For nearly 40 years, the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) has served the higher education community by providing community and technical college faculty, staff, and administrators with programs and resources that facilitate teaching and learning excellence. In preparation of the 2017 NISOD’s annual conference, we asked NISOD Executive Director Edward J. Leach to share some fun facts, details, and information about this “must-attend” event for community and technical college educators.

Tim Suchomski provides webinar support in MATEC's control room at the Maricopa Community College District in Phoenix, Arizona.

In a classic entrepreneurial move, MATEC NetWorks responded to declining attendance at its in-person professional development programs by trying webinars. These experiments with the emerging Internet-based seminars instructed faculty in—well—other new technologies.

That was 2010. Early webinar systems were awkward to operate and the software licenses were expensive. But as MATEC's team worked out the kinks in its manufacturing education-oriented programs with National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education support, it found audiences for its content and clients for its webinar services.

MATEC, officially the MATEC NetWorks National Resource Center, now serves as producer and host of about 50 webinars annually for various ATE centers and projects, the American Association of Community Colleges, Arizona State University, and the 10 colleges of the Maricopa Community College District. (See list of collaborators and links to their webinars at the end of the article.)

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Members of the ATE community devote an incredible amount of time and effort to identifying potential partners, developing contacts and relationships, and cultivating these partnerships to sustain them over the long term. Feedback from key stakeholders, collaborators, industry partners, and colleagues from across the ATE community can provide you with many benefits and perspectives. So whether you are looking for help as you revamp curriculum, cultivating partners to write a new proposal, or considering how to tie your ATE project or center goals more closely to your institution’s mission, it pays to think about how best to engage collaborators in your ATE related work.