LI tech companies seek student engineers
Tony Favale, left, president and chief executive of Advanced Energy Systems, shows his company's summer intern, Brandon Siegenfeld, the production facility in the company's Medford operation. (May 31, 2011) Credit: Newsday / Thomas A. Ferrara
Long Island business executives and officials at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in East Garden City are going to be making a major push this summer to address one of Long Island's most crucial problems: the growing shortage of students interested in careers in engineering and technology.
The Cradle, which has had an arrangement with the Westbury School District for the last three years to provide math and science classes at the museum for about 70 students for a half-day every school day, will expand its efforts this summer.
About 16 Long Island engineering, aerospace and technology companies have agreed in June, July and August to take students from Westbury and some other underserved school districts on tours to show them how the businesses work and the role they could one day play in the industry.
Next week, the students will visit Hauppauge-based Globecomm Systems Inc., which provides satellite-based communications systems and services, and Arkwin Industries, an aviation parts company, in Westbury.
"Everybody complains kids aren't interested in science and math," Andrew Parton, the Cradle's executive director, said Tuesday. "We think we've found a way to excite them and at the same time for companies to [eventually] hire them. "It's a small program, but there's no reason why other institutions can't do the same."
"There are fewer and fewer" engineering students, said Globecomm chief executive David Hershberg. "And this is something we need as a country."
The students must show proficiency in math and science to be selected for the program, Parton said. In the coming school year, about 300 students will participate, some from Uniondale and Freeport, as well as Westbury.
The dwindling number of engineering graduates on Long Island is alarming to some. The Island's largest school, Stony Brook University, graduates between 550 to 600 engineers a year -- the bulk of the engineering grads on Long Island -- school officials said. That is about half the number graduating from schools in the Seattle area, whose population is less than half of Long Island's.
Tony Favale, president of Medford-based Advanced Energy Systems, one of the companies Cradle students will tour this summer, has hired for this summer a 19-year-old Boston University engineering student, Brandon Siegenfeld, of Melville.
"He gets to do a lot of things not available to college students, and we get to see how he responds," Favale said.
As for Siegenfeld, summer couldn't be better. "What's cool is I'm able to ask questions and learn about everything," he said.
