Last year we placed a graduate with a water and wastewater systems engineering firm — that does SCADA master plans, HMI design, and PLC programming, along with cybersecurity and resilience consulting.
The graduate has had several of this colleagues and supervisors come to tour of our instructional facilities, and discuss our curriculum.
On a recent tour, we stopped at looked at the conduit bending station I blogged about several weeks ago.
We looked at our flow control trainers and talked about the custom multiplexing printed circuit board.
We stopped to examine the “pressure wall” in our mechanical engineering technology area. Here our students can adjust the height of pumps that move liquid through pipes of various materials — copper, PVC, steel. They can open and close valves by hand. And they can hook the pipes to pressure transmitters. They get to calculate pressure head and think about turbulent flow.
The graduate said “I’ve heard so many people say ‘In my job, don’t use anything I learned in school’; but, I feel like I use everything I learned in this program.”
I smiled.
Some may ask what these things have to do with cyber security — well, these determine the effects of an attack. This is what you can do if you control the pumps and the valves.
Our guest was impressed: “I wish this program had been around when I was a student!
I said “Me too. That’s what we set out to build!”