Thousands of students made a virtual visit to the ABB Motors and Mechanical booth during the annual Junior Achievement Inspire event in late March. The event, which is similar to a career fair, is usually held at the Greenville Convention Center in Greenville, South Carolina. However, because of COVID-19 and gathering restrictions organizers created a virtual affair. Junior Achievement is a non-profit that focuses on preparing students for success beyond high school.
“They focus on job readiness through delivering courses - not just here in Greenville, but here in South Carolina and nationally,” MOPT’s Senior Development Engineer Thomas Kuckhoff said.
Students who stopped by the virtual booth got an opportunity to learn more about Dodge products and career opportunities.
“Our engineering team has been working with Clemson University through sponsoring Capstone projects, so what we wanted to do was showcase some of the collaborations we’ve done with Clemson,” Kuckhoff said. “Some of the students who visited the booth wanted to be able to start applying and seeing where they can get an internship, or go ahead and apply right to manufacturing. So, of course, we wanted to have the career link to do that.”
Kuckhoff created and hosted the virtual booth and says he enjoyed educating students about the Dodge products.
“I like to tell the students- you walk through your day and I’ll tell you when you’ve run into a Dodge product. No one knows that if you go to the Roper Mountain Science Center (in Greenville, South Carolina) it’s all Dodge gearboxes and bearings that power the 8th largest telescope in the U.S.,” Kuckhoff said. “People don’t know that within Hartsfield- Jackson Airport (in Atlanta), it’s all Dodge in that conveyor system.”
Kuckhoff’s role as an engineer is to ensure Dodge products meet the needs of customers and the market.
It’s very easy to come up with a shiny new product, but if the product is absolutely worthless if it doesn’t address the problem that our customers are faced with it’s not successful,” Kuckhoff said.
He says it’s important to expose students to manufacturing and give them insight into how the fields of STEM are used.
“Not all students will go to college or enter a four-year educational program. So, showing them the avenues within manufacturing in South Carolina is something I really wanted to showcase,” Kuckhoff said.
More than 4,000 students who visited the booth asked questions and MOPT engineers answered them while online.
“The questions aligned with what we put on in the booth. So, we got questions like ‘We’re in South Carolina how many machines do you use?’ ‘Do you guys use any solar?’ ‘How do you guys give back to making sure that you’re reducing your carbon footprint?’ So, it was fun to talk about the solar farm in Belton, South Carolina where there’s zero-landfill status in a lot of our plants.”
Kuckhoff said more than 2,000 students opened and viewed documents at the virtual booth and nearly 2,000 viewed videos.
