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Introduction

The Columbus Region Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow Ohio Means Internships & Co-ops (LIFT OMIC 2.5) program led by Ohio State’s Ohio Manufacturing Institute (OMI) offers co-located and traditional internships for manufacturing firms of all sizes to access students primarily at The Ohio State University and regional community colleges. Funded by the Ohio Department of Higher Education, the co-located internship program is connected to the federal Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow program (LIFT) outcomes to train the workforce in advanced and lightweight manufacturing skills.

In the effort to make the program as industry driven as possible, the LIFT OMIC 2.5 team took a multi-pronged approach to engaging manufacturers both small and large. We included industry partners in a committee of academic, economic development partners and marketed the program to both companies and students alike via career fairs, newsletter announcements, Buckeye Career Network, Ohio Means Internships, site visits and social media.

From an earlier co-located internship model that developed at OMI, the primary intent of the program was to allow co-located interns to gain hands-on experience working with faculty mentors and manufacturers on real-world advanced manufacturing projects with defined goals, timelines and deliverables. Students interns received an hourly rate, academic credit, and free access to industry-related online training modules. We engaged leadership at the academic institutions to recommend faculty mentors. After multiple efforts to reach individual faculty to conduct the advanced manufacturing internships resulted in one co-located internship project, we approached several industry-facing research centers with existing student internship programs. Based on the number and quality of existing student industry projects conducted by Ohio State’s Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence (CDME), the OMIC 2.5 team forged an alliance with the center to engage their interns and engineering project managers in the program.

From July 1, 2015 to December 2016, the grant activity resulted in 95 advanced manufacturing internship and co-op placements. With Central Ohio academic partners, OMI placed interns at 37 business partners in the region. Ultimately, the project-based internships with research center staff mentorship and industry support offer another entry point for manufacturers to gain access to new product development and technology acceleration. Establishing student internships, including co-located internships, is a way to increase business innovation and fulfill the goals of university research centers.

LIFT Ohio Means Internships & Co-ops 2.5 Program CDME Co-located Internship Analysis

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What follows is an analysis conducted on the efficacy and outcomes gathered from student and staff mentors. Recommendations and next steps are also offered in this report.

Methodology

Kari Taylor, a former graduate administrative associate at Ohio State’s Center for the Study of Student Life, conducted interviews of eight students who completed co-located internships in Spring or Summer 2016; six faculty and staff who mentored a student were also asked about the program. She presented her findings to OMI in May 2017.

Six of the students were interviewed from the following majors:

• Visual Communication Design • Marketing • Mechanical Engineering • Materials Science Engineering • Industrial Design • Industrial and Systems Engineering

Students worked on a variety of industry projects that included designing pull testers using different joining techniques for an automobile manufacturer; developing training content on resistance spot welding; and the producing an in-mold coating device to reduce the overall costs of painting, reduce emissions during the process and increase the lifetime viability of the object’s surface. In addition to interviewing students that formed multidisciplinary project teams, the faculty and engineering project managers who served as mentors were also contacted to be interviewed about the program. Given the lack of information from co-located internships that existed prior to the OMIC 2.5 program and the inability to complete the sole faculty mentor interview, reference is made to established internships, such as College of Engineering capstone projects. Although variation exists in the types of traditional student internships engaged by manufacturers with faculty, many student-assisted projects are conducted on a semester or yearly basis. The remainder of the OMIC 2.5 internships followed this approach. While this format may work well for large companies that can offer multiple projects, some industry requests are best suited within timeframes that do not fit within the academic calendar. Capstone design projects are usually conducted during students’ senior year, where they spend one to two semesters tackling real-world problems before graduation. During the 2016-2017 academic year, for example, more than 700 students representing 14 engineering majors and 20 non-engineering majors presented over 200 projects. While these projects include multidisciplinary teams, the structure does not lend itself to flexibility nor students being able to engage in multiple projects within a given semester.

Results

Students who were interviewed about the co-located internship experience at CDME indicated that one of the biggest advantages to the program was that they learned hands-on skills and directly interacted with industry partners with the guidance of CDME staff mentors. One student mentioned that more hands-on training was provided at CDME than in any classroom setting; in addition, this experience could be positively applied to class. The participating students understood the real-world applications of technology and appreciated the increasing

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responsibilities offered to them. Instead of one project for which they had a defined role, students were able to work on a wide range of projects and teams. Ultimately, the students could diversify their portfolios working on these projects.

The students perceived some challenges in working within the CDME model. They were sometimes not comfortable discussing technologies that were new to them to industry partners. The shifting landscape of new industry clients and organizational priorities were confusing. They were concerned about managing time-sensitive projects within a limited work schedule and while juggling classes. Even with the benefits of working on multi-disciplinary teams, sometimes communication issues surfaced. Students suggested that CDME should develop a more standardized internship model whereby students receive pre-defined levels of responsibility and are assigned projects that are a better “fit” within their areas of expertise.

The overlap between the CDME student and staff responses serve as indicators that the mentors’ awareness of the process and outcomes of the co-located internships were in sync with the student experiences. Several staff had supervised students before and saw the value of the new perspectives and knowledge that students bring to an industry project. They also observed the advantages of on-the-job training for students offered a “multiplier effect” on innovation, and ultimately, cultivated a more talented workforce pipeline for industry clients. By allowing students to become immersed in the inner workings of projects, they indicated that not only did this help them learn new technologies quicker but also brought them up to speed to interact more readily with industry. CDME staff found the interdisciplinary teams to be useful on projects.

Students

ClientMentor

Projects

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Recommendations from staff revolved around building a support ecosystem for student internships and standardizing the mentorships so that staff were assigned to specific students. In addition, they mentioned that they would like to ensure that students were matched with mentors and projects that fit their professional goals, abilities and interests. Connecting student teams to projects while dealing with limited work and class schedules involved considerable advance planning and tested timelines on company projects. Compounding factors also included tailoring the tasks to student abilities, especially first-year students, and the time needed to double check the accuracy of industry work.

In terms of the LIFT OMIC 2.5 structure, the $1,000 scholarships were of great benefit to the students and incentivized high-quality students to work on industry projects at CDME. On the other hand, the $5,000 offered to staff members for their participation as mentors was not a primary motivator, especially given the administrative difficulties in transferring funds to applicable center accounts.

With additional time, next steps in analyzing the research center model would be to interview the manufacturing clients to determine their satisfaction with the co-located internship model used at CDME to provide technical support.

Recommendations and Next Steps

Using the model that CDME has developed would be an effective way for research labs at Ohio State to engage with industry while sustaining a student workforce that has flexible terms. As mentioned in the introduction, OMIC 2.5’s multidisciplinary team approach to gain hands-on experience working on real-world industry projects were benefits already being practiced by CDME. Project goals, timelines and deliverables had been implemented by staff, resulting in a quick transition to OMIC’s deliverables.

Client

Mentor

Projects

Students

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Two items not mentioned as benefits during the interviews were the transcript notation students received upon completing the internships and the availability of free Moresteam online modules. No information is available as to whether the transcript notation or learning moduleswere used as incentives for recruiting students or clients. Based on reports gathered from Moresteam, modules were fulIy utilized by CDME interns and allowed them to quickly learn industry skills; the lessons included a Six Sigma Green Belt program as well as training on soft skills such as communication and quality management principles. In particular, continuing the Moresteam online training modules as part of the initial few weeks of intern training may provide advantages in quickly onboarding students in preparation for industry projects.

With some standardization and metrics development, other industry-facing research centers at Ohio State and other higher education institutions would be able to serve industry better through internship programs similar to the CDME model. Developing incentives for participation outside of OMIC-type benefits to increase engineering staff and project manager active mentorship on student projects would help other research centers adopt this practice.

Prepared by: Kathryn L. Kelley, Ohio Manufacturing Institute