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Warsaw Area Career Center’s Regional Advanced Manufacturing Pathway (RAMP) has evolved into RAMP 2.0.
“The new model, why we’re calling it 2.0, for the first time we are combining engineering students and manufacturing students together in a cohort model. To where as they’re juniors, they will go to Ivy Tech on Tuesdays and Thursdays and take two college classes, one a semester. That’s completely different than what we’ve done in the past,” WACC Director Ben Barkey explained Wednesday to RAMP 2.0 students and their parents at the ceremonial signing for the program.
“So we’re really excited to be able to offer them college credit, but also on Fridays industry partners will come in for about nine weeks and spend an hour with this cohort of students, sharing about what they do,” he said.
RAMP already offered a select group of junior and senior manufacturing pathway students the opportunity to gain fundamental manufacturing skills, hands-on experience and an internship opportunity with one of four industry partners.
“So we have done RAMP now for three years. The new high school diploma came out this year for incoming freshman, and that has allowed us to be more innovative. And even though the students that we’re signing today are sophomores going to be juniors and juniors going to be seniors in RAMP, we decided to tweak our program where we’re kind of calling it RAMP 2.0,” Barkey said in an interview before the ceremony.
The students that are going to be juniors, they are not only getting to know the industry partners, but they’re also on Tuesdays and Thursdays leaving school part of the day to take Ivy Tech classes that the industry partners want them to take that the WACC can’t offer. Those classes are on blueprint reading and GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing).
“The cool thing is, OrthoWorx is paying for 90% of the Ivy Tech bill. Students are just paying $100 (per class) because they need skin in the game, and it’s also a great opportunity that they’re going to get credits that we don’t offer, for very affordable,” Barkey stated.
Deb Pitzer, Ivy Tech dean of the School of Advanced Manufacturing, Engineering and Applied Science, explained, “We’re going to start in the fall with one class - so it’s one class in the fall, one class in the spring for the RAMP program. So, blueprint reading, or what we call print interpretation, in the fall, and then in the spring we’ll do the GD&T class. They’ll come to us at the OAMTC (Orthopedic and Advanced Manufacturing Training Center).”
She reiterated those two classes were picked by the industry partners who decided that those were the things the students needed in addition to what they were already getting.
“GD&T is very important, especially with the orthopedics industry,” Pitzer said. “It actually tags on to blueprint reading. It’s part of blueprint reading, but it’s another way to define the quality characteristics of a part. So if you used to blueprint reading where the tolerance says 1.5 00 + or - 3,000nds, GD&T actually has what’s called a feature control frame and it will give that dimension in a different way and it controls it not only in a xy form, but it can be a xyz, can be a circular form. It’s just another way to control a part’s dimensions and it’s actually better.”
The high school students will be considered dual enrolled students while taking the classes at Ivy Tech.
“So they’ll have a real college transcript starting the day we start,” Pitzer said. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to have them come to Ivy Tech and see what else is there for them at the OAMTC.”
The group of students at Wednesday’s ceremony, who are in their first year of the RAMP 2.0, half of them are engineering students and the other half are machining welding students.
“That was intentional,” Barkey stated. “So, Mrs. (Emily) Campbell and I, we recruited. We went to both of those pathways. So we went in for the sophomore classes because this starts your junior year. So over 100 kids, they all filled out forms if they’re interested or not. So we took 13 kids out of a total of 35 that said they were interested that met the criteria - GPA, grades, attendance and all those things. And it’s great to have a cohort of students that are both ends of the manufacturing spectrum. So that’s what is cool: Our manufacturing, machining, welding students are going to learn a little bit about engineering, which is amazing for their career. And our engineering students are going to learn a little bit about manufacturing and CNC mills and lathes and how to do that.”
He said RAMP 2.0 is a really great program with a ton of partners.
In their senior year of the RAMP 2.0, those students have half a day at school, but then go to one of the manufacturing partners: Medartis, Instrumental Machine and Development (IMD), Precision Medical Technologies or Zimmer Biomet.
The pathway to the manufacturing partners begins with a “boot camp” of sorts.
“Our partners come every Thursday to meet with this junior group to show them about their culture. So it’s like an eight- to nine-week boot camp that they come in and bring HR one time, they do a field trip one time and so that way our industry partners get to know the cohort and start picking out ‘ooh, this person kind of matches what we kind of do.’ And then we have a hiring fair in April and now we have the signing in May. Not every kid gets selected because it’s competitive, and not every partner gets their top choice because we both partners and students rank when they do the interview, and then we really try to make it work,” Barkey said.
Current sophomores will have unique schedules in their junior year next year to make the RAMP 2.0 work, being able to leave periods six and seven.
“For example, some of them, it just depends, because manufacturing - they still have to take their welding and machining classes with us, engineers still have to take an engineering class with us - so they only have a few classes. So some of them have to take U.S. history kind of online, which is good because this opportunity kind of trumps being in the classroom for U.S. history, and that’s not something that’s offered to the masses. It’s only offered to a select few kids that get these opportunities, and they’re all strong students. They couldn’t have gotten into this program without being capable students,” Barkey said.
