Edgewood Middle School students participated in the school’s second Futures in Manufacturing event Thursday and got exposed to the manufacturing field.
During the event, students were put into groups with mentors in order to design and build a package to protect an egg from being broken. They then threw the package about 4 meters to see if the egg would survive the throw. The packages were put through a second test of having books dropped on them to see if the eggs cracked.
Approximately 52 seventh- and eighth-grade students participated in Thursday’s event. There were 15 mentors from the manufacturing field, including from Zimmer Biomet, DePuy, Medtronic, Paragon Medical, OrthoWorx and Medartis.
During the event, Project Lead the Way teacher Abbi Richcreek shared some information on the manufacturing industry. The manufacturing industry employs 1 in 5 Hoosiers and is the biggest industry in Kosciusko County. The average annual compensation from 2021 was $86,000.

    Erin Serafino (L) works with Edgewood Middle School students during Thursday’s Futures in Manufacturing event. Photo by Jackie Gorski, Times-Union
  

Several of the mentors talked about their pathway in the manufacturing field.
Blake Gross, from Medartis, said he’s been in the manufacturing industry for the past five years in Warsaw. He started at Zimmer Biomet making medical devices.
He started out when he was younger learning how things work, manufactured and produced. He decided to take math classes in high school and went on to Purdue University for engineering. Now he gets to make medical devices.
He said there’s a lot of cool places to work here in Warsaw.
Dante Zumbo, Paragon Medical, said when he was in high school, he was interested in some sort of STEM-related field, but hadn’t narrowed it down yet, so he took the most advanced classes available in STEM topics. After that, he felt the biomedical field was for him.
He went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute. He did some internships while in colleges and found the manufacturing field with a lot of problem solving and critical thinking involved.
Thursday’s event was sponsored by OrthoWorx.
Erin Serafino, of OrthoWorx, said OrthoWorx is dedicated to keeping Warsaw the orthopedic capital of the world and a big component of that is encouraging students in local schools to enter careers in orthopedics field, specifically in manufacturing.
“So any projects or efforts that we can support in our local schools that raise awareness of manufacturing and the careers in manufacturing, we are looking to support,” Serafino said. “We have a lot of good jobs here for students, whether they want to go to college or not, and we would just love to retain the talent that we have.”
Richcreek said she hopes students get an experience of considering a career in manufacturing of some sort.
“It’s experiences that helps determine what you like best and what interests you the most so I feel like in middle school, it’s one of the pivotal points where they need information on their future. And what better way to give them this experience to consider a career in manufacturing,” Richcreek said.