National Manufacturing Day is this Friday, but Pittsburgh high schoolers got to ring in the festivities two days early.
More than 100 Pittsburgh area high school students descended on Mill 19 at Hazelwood Green Wednesday morning. The 265,000-square-foot, three-building complex sits on the former grounds of the Jones & Laughlin Steel company, and is now the headquarters of Carnegie Mellon University's Manufacturing Futures Institute. Mill 19 also houses the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, the manufacturing economic development nonprofit Catalyst Connection and the self-driving car company Motional.
Each organization showcased various offerings for students as they passed through, including information on career and technical opportunities, panels from current leaders in the field, and live demonstrations.
Sandra DeVincent Wolf, the executive director of the Manufacturing Futures Institute said the event, which has been held every year since the building opened in 2019, is a unique opportunity to introduce manufacturing opportunities to communities.
“In this sector and honestly, in many other sectors, we're just missing the rest of the population. And so we work hard, particularly with this event, to reach out to the Pittsburgh Public Schools, to bring in schools and organizations that don't have as many resources as some of the other schools in the area, so that they have this exposure so they can get excited about it,” DeVincent Wolf said.
Students, teachers and administrators visited from 10 Pittsburgh area schools and had contrasting views on the manufacturing industry and their future roles in it.
Matt, a 10th grader at Brashear High School, was an enthusiastic participant and no stranger to Pittsburgh’s industrial manufacturing landscape.
“My stepmom used to do manufacturing [at the] warehouse for Ulta Beauty. And there was a day where you could bring your kids,” Matt recalled. “And then I went to Aerotech with Mr. Muro, my teacher, and I saw this and I just thought like, this is friggin’ awesome,” he added.
Markayla, a ninth grader at Nazareth Prep, hopes to become a paramedic after graduating from high school, but gravitated towards demonstrations that featured engineering skills and robotics at the Manufacturing Day events.
“I would say the body is kind of like a robot because it needs certain things to operate,” Markayla said.
In addition to seeing robots capable of advanced welding and playing ping-pong, students were also introduced to cutting edge motion sensing technology and a self-driving car, developed by Motional.
Mike Osiecki, a teacher at Passport Academy Charter School, said many of his students have built-in assumptions about what a manufacturing career looks like, and that events like this can challenge those assumptions and empower students to find their own place in a surprisingly diverse field.
“Obviously, we're a blue-collar kind of city. So many of the students’ parents are into that nature of work. But also, it's new to some of the folks in the area. We have people coming in and out of the area in our school all the time. So we try to expose them to as much opportunity as we can,” Osiecki said.
