Young people looking for a career often don’t consider the benefits of a well-paying, secure position in the field of transportation simply because they don’t know much about it, according to educators and researchers at the University of Rhode Island Transportation Center.
A program sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration and the R.I. Department of Transportation (RIDOT) and hosted by the University of Rhode Island Transportation Center is now in its fifth year of trying to change that.
Thirty-four middle school students from across the state took part in two separate sessions of the Summer Transportation Institute in July and August, seeing for themselves the many facets of the transportation industry and its importance to our modern world.
“Many companies in the transportation industry have a hard time finding enough trained workers to get the job done, and that’s partly due to the fact that students often don’t think of the transportation field as a career option,” said Deborah Rosen, director of the center and associate dean of the URI College of Business. “Our transportation camps and academies are designed to develop the transportation work force of the future, and to do that we have to reach them when they’re still young.”
Jeffrey Cathcart is in charge of the engineering academies in his capacity as director of technology transfer and outreach for the transportation center, established in 1999 to conduct education and research for surface transportation systems and advanced transportation infrastructure. He says the transportation field includes career opportunities in such areas as engineering, construction, design and maintenance.
“These jobs are never going to be shipped overseas,” he said.
Eighteen students took part in the first two-week session of the Summer Transportation Institute in July, and another 16 participated in the last session that ended Aug. 15. About to enter the seventh, eighth and ninth grades, the students are from all over Rhode Island, and … “pretty evenly split” between boys and girls, Cathcart said.
The program combines classroom instruction with hands-on activities and visits to various transportation-related facilities in the state and nearby Massachusetts, including T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, the South Kingstown train station and the Museum of Science in Boston. To get to Boston, Cathcart said, organizers make sure the youths experience as many transportation options as possible, so they begin the trip by train and end by subway.
In Rhode Island, the students visited the Quonset Air Museum in North Kingstown, founded in 1992 to preserve the state’s aviation legacy, along with other Quonset Point attractions. At the air museum, students saw military aircraft and helicopters. Afterwards, they went out on a lobster boat, the Sea Princess, for a tour of Narragansett Bay.
The institute has also taken students to the New England Laborers Training Academy (NELTA) in Hopkinton, Mass., where an estimated 5,000 to 7,500 laborers from all over the region receive training each year. Cathcart said that the academy is where the professionals learn the finer points of building roads, bridges and tunnels.
A key part of the program takes place in the classroom, where students actually design a bridge. Working in teams, they use computer software to design the span and then they build it out of balsa wood. “We will test the bridges they make and see which one holds the most weight,” Cathcart said.
The program has achieved some success. Cathcart spoke of a female student who took part in the first season of the summer institute and now is heading to URI, where she will major in civil engineering. “That’s the pathway we’re hoping to establish,” Cathcart said. •
