I've never included Ferris State University on my fall Tech Tour of Michigan's high-tech universities.
Boy, was I missing out.
Ferris State sent me on a whirlwind tour of the Big Rapids school Tuesday, with seven stops in seven hours starting at 7 a.m. And while I'm bushed right now, I'm also charged up by the exciting technologies and programs I saw -- and how they can help Michigan transform its economy past the Rust Belt.
My day began in the office of FSU president David L. Eisler, who's starting his sixth year at the helm. Eisler ticked off a list of the ways Ferris is unique among Michigan public universities, from its 1884 founding as a private school by Woodbridge Ferris (who later served two terms as Michigan governor and died in 1928 as a United States Senator) to the programs you can find there that you can't find at any other Michigan institution -- and few in the United States.
Ferris has 13,500 students overall, 9,700 at its main campus. It educates more than half the pharmacists in Michigan. It offers classes at 20 community college campuses around the state. It offers the first professional golf management, professional tennis managemnet and music industry management courses in the nation. It also has a state-leading degree program in optometry that just got state permission for a new 94,000-square-foot building, replacing a renovated residence hall the program has called home since 1978. The school has also replaced parking lots with parkland to create a more pedestrian-friendly campus. And on a softly warm fall day it looked absolutely gorgeous.
But it's the college of technology where Ferris really shines. My next stop was that college, and a visit with its dean, Thomas E. Oldfield, and associate dean Ron McKean.
Ferris It graduates more engineering technology bachelor's degrees than any other school in the country. How's that different from a regular engineering degree? Mostly a matter of focus -- engineering technology graduates are industry-ready, having studied an applied curriculum of courses that have specific application to careers.
The college has about 2,000 students overall, all of whom will get more lab hours than traditional engineering students (at the admitted expense of some of the math expertise of regular engineering students). Ferris offers degrees in electrical engineering technology, mechanical engineering technology, manufacturing engineering technolgoy, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration engineering technology and more.
Ferris officials said their 18 bachelor's programs have placement rates at or near 100 percent with starting salaries well above $50,000 a year.
And they see that continuing.
"We're pretty optimistic," McKean said. "We know as many people as we can get in the door we can place them in good careers. Looking ahead we want to get more involved in renewable energy and energy efficiency."
Oldfield said new programs are also being considered in medical device engineering technology, a plastics packaging degree and residential sustainable building.
Next up was Ferris' rubber and plastics programs, led by Robert G. Speirs, professor and department chair.
Ferris offers one of a handful of bachelor's degrees in plastics engineering technology in the country and its only one in rubber engineering technology.
"The program is process intensive, which means conversion of polymers into end products with all of the process techniques," Speirs said. "What makes us unique is the hands on practical experience the kids get."
The program has about 120 plastics majors and 20 rubber majors now. And a tour of the first floor labs of the building revealed a factory setup very much reminiscent of an actual workplace, emphasizing the school's career-based focus.
"The college philosophy is to get them exposed immediately so they understand what their major really is," Spiers said. "We get them involved, or get them someplace else if they aren't excited about it. Students are in their careers at Ferris first class first semester freshman year."
And he said he doesn't see "any waning of the demand" for his program's graduates. "Our guys are known for hitting the ground running, being capable and able to do the job within days. It's not uncommon for me to get a call from an alum in late summer, where they ask me, 'What do they DO at fill-in-the-name-of-the-school? This guy knows a lot about calculus but doesn't know anything about how the plant works."
Next up was a sobering visit with the faculty of Ferris' information security and intelligence degree, the first of its kind in the country. The multidisciplinary degree targets corporate needs as well as those of law enforcement, defense and intelligence organizations. Ferris is offering it at its Grand Rapids and Traverse City campuses.
Greg Gogolin and Jim Jones, professors in the program, led me on a demonstration of technology that tracks down connections between people using phones, as well as information within files.
Such skills, he said, are huge in a variety of industries, from insurance to financial services. "It can also be used at a corporation," he said. "You can put bots out on a corporate netowrk to see who's doing what, who's stealing your secrets, who's goofing off."
But it isn't just a technical degree. The major also requires courses in public relations, foreign languages and religion, to help them if they go into law enforcement, and borrowing content from statistics, graphical information services and more.
The program's students got a recent visit from the Department of Defense -- which essentially offered them all jobs after graduation.
"We could probably have 300 to 400 students in this program a year based on demand," Gogolin said.
Well, after that, it was time for a visit to the toy department -- only not really. David Baker, instructor and program director of the digital animation and game design program, told me that computer games are more serious business than ever.
Baker came to Ferris from his own animation studio -- echoing a common theme among Ferris faculty, many of whom came from the industries they now teach.
Today, the program has five full-time faculty and three adjunct instructors. It has grown from its initial focus on animation, but now includes more technical visual arts -- stuff the industry calls technical direction.
Baker said the program's graduates are being snapped up, both by local design firms in West Michigan and studios in California.
Baker said the next big market is "edutainment," or so-called serious gaming.
Said Baker: "Seroius gaming is the way we're going to be training in the future. The U.S. Army uses serious games to teach our students how to walk down the street in Baghdad."
Another area, he said, are massive multiplayer environments like Second Life, which have huge potential for applications like meetings and training.
"We're just seeing the beginning of this stuff," he said. "Video games have been around for 40 years now and in the public eye for 30 but we're just now learning how powerful this can be."
Next up was a visit with Patrick Klarecki, professor and department chair of the printing and imaging technology management program. Klarecki's in his 17th year in the program after a career with Valsssis Communications, the Sunday newspaper coupon insert publisher.
Ferris has had a printing industry program for 53 years, originally establishing it at the behest of the Michigan Press Association, which was experiencing a shortage of Linotype operators.
Well, obviously the printing industry has changed a lot since then, with the home computer and printer allowing the public to do its own printing. Today instead the program has focused on the image, its technical formatting and distribution, whether for the Web, paper or PDA, Klarecki said.
Ferris has just under 100 people in the program with a capacity for 120. Unlike some Ferris programs, Klarecki said, "our challenge is, despite how much in our lives is printed, we are a largely unknown profession -- it's sometimes tough to get students excited about us." Nevertheless, this program as well reports 100 percent job placement.
The printing program is one of just 10 in the world supported by the printing press giant Heidelberg (the others in the U.S. are Cal Poly and RPI) and has a basement full of printing presses, some antique and some state-of-the-art.
Sitting in on the session was Chris Peterson, a Ferris grad and vice president of business development at Wolverine Business Solutions of Grand Rapids. He showed me a bunch of cool samples and ideas for the latest in printing technology.
Some of that technology, which marries printing with computer power are being used by Ferris State -- including individually tailored recruitment materials.
The day's final official visit was at Ferris' Granger Center, home to the school's construction and HVAC programs, which features clear walls (and sometimes no walls at all) to show off all of the building's operational innards.
I spoke with Thomas Crandell, director of corporate and professional development, and Douglas Zentz, associate profesor in the HVACR department, about Ferris' involvement in building technologies -- and their increasing green focus.
Ferris, in a familiar-sounding refrain, offers one of only two bachelor's degrees in HVACR in the country (the other's at Penn State). Among other offerings, it provides energy audits to West Michigan buildings, including a recent one at a Grand Rapids museum that saved the institution $750,000 a year.
Zentz said Ferris' eventual goal is to create an energy center to offer "new degrees in better building sciences." He said Michigan's building codes are woefully behind the state of the art in energy efficiency.
Finally, both men spoke of "exergy," or cradle-to-cradle energy analysis of buildings, which looks not only at energy consumption, but also where the energy involved was generated, through which technologies and at what cost to the environment -- as well as what the life span of the building is and what the energy costs are to either recycle the building or refurbish it.
I ended my visit at Ferris State with a delightful lunch at a downtown sandwich shop with Shelly L. Armstrong, interim vice president of university advancement and marketing, and Leah Nixon, assistant director of news services (who sacrificed half a workday to squire me around).
It's hard to overemphsize how impressive Ferris was as a hotbed of tech education, and a provider of skilled professionals for Michigan's high-tech future. Let's just leave it at this: I'll be back.
Wednesday's Tech Tour visit is at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Can't wait!
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