This past week I was able to take part in one of the many incentives EXAIR offers to all of our team members, a volunteer day. EXAIR gives each employee the choice to go out into our community and choose an organization they connect with to volunteer for either a single 8-hour day or two 4-hour shifts. The past couple of years, I have reconnected with the director of the Mechanical Engineering Technology department at the University of Cincinnati where I received an undergraduate degree from to find out how I can get involved with the program and help the department that gave me the knowledge and understanding I use in my career. Much to my surprise, the first thing that came to mind for him was to be a judge at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senior Tech Expo. This expo is where each student will showcase their Senior Design Project which they must complete in order to graduate. The judges are all alumni of their given programs and the students can elect to have their project be judged for various prizes that are donated by local companies and alumni. This was my third year judging for the MET department and there have been several of us that have networked and really get reminded of exactly where we were when we graduated and the amount of experience we lacked at the time.

There were 11 projects total in the MET discipline that were elected to be judged this year. We had 12 judges show up, so we broke into 4 teams. Three teams judged three projects while the remaining judged two larger scale projects. We judge the individuals/teams on different criteria like, communication skills, technical knowledge, presentation, complexity, marketability, and innovation. The projects my team evaluated were a hybrid system that would bolt onto an early 2000s Nissan Frontier and increase the vehicles’ efficiency, a team from the UC Battle Robotics Club, and a company-backed project to increase efficiency on vegetation mitigation equipment to better sustain power within the new equipment designs.

Each of these projects had great goals, highs, lows, oversights, learning points, and yet it was very great to see how truly vested each of these students had become in this project. They knew their subject inside and out and even when they had a pitfall come. This did not derail them, this took me back to when the team I was part of built a Basic Utility Vehicle as our project. We competed in a national competition with a vehicle which was fully funded by sponsorship we obtained and poured hours upon hours of work and sweat into it. The drivetrain which I designed did experience two different failures during our competition. Rather than loading up and taking a loss, we pushed through as a team, we made a new chain tensioner with parts from a hardware store, and found a judge with a welder nearby which permitted us to weld a broken attachment point back on. Ultimately, we took second place. A team of 4 students was only beaten by a team of 12 from Wisconsin. The experience I learned in that process and time during the competition truly taught me that if you are passionate about something you will make it happen. That’s the same level of passion I saw in each of the students that I interviewed during the judging cycle.

In the end, it really builds one of my favorite sayings, “You can’t teach experience.” Each of these students has experienced a lot, and yet they still have so much to learn. Without the volunteer program here at EXAIR, I may not have gotten to go back to my alma mater and participate as a judge for the Tech Expo. That’s an experience I have gained a lot from. Mainly, instead of asking judgmental questions, ask curiously. This often means asking open-ended questions that aren’t so pointed. This generally brings out more reasoning and explanation than one could expect and leads to a more comfortable discussion. These students all helped me to see that, and it let their passions shine straight through. Once the interviews were done, all the judges came together and dispersed $12,000 in prizes for various awards to these 11 projects within the Mechanical Engineering Technology Department. The passion I had for learning and projects still lives to this day. I still keep a list of ideas for EXAIR products that I am saving for rainy days or for the right time to test.

If you have a problem you can’t get past, need a curious question answered or need someone to share in your passion that involves industrial compressed air, moving, cleaning, cooling, coating, eliminating static, spraying, or conserving a resource, share it with us, we’ll be genuinely curious.

Brian Farno, CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF