The New Product Development Lab, part of BSU’s College of Engineering, puts its student employees together with industry innovators in the design, development and creation of products and components of all types, university officials said Tuesday.
Budding mechanical engineers get hands-on learning in class projects and also work as technicians for local businesses. The lab can inexpensively build and test ideas using 3-D printers and other rapid prototyping tools.
The lab is “a really innovative program,” Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday. “You have a lot of students from Idaho getting the kinds of good engineering skills that will be critical to finding a good middle-class job, but also critical to ensuring that our nation has the kind of economy that produces things in an innovative way.”
Its work is just the kind of higher education experience the president is seeking to highlight in his post-State of the Union tour. Along with his call for nationwide tuition-free community college, it represents the kind of educational opportunities he wants to see.
His visit to Boise on Wednesday will be his first to Idaho as sitting president. Obama will spend about an hour at the lab and students will “have the opportunity to show the president some of the prototypes for projects they’ve been working on,” Earnest said.
After the tour, the president will address a standing-room-only crowd at Boise State’s Caven-Williams Sports Complex. He then will leave Boise and head to the University of Kansas, where he will speak Thursday.
Earnest said national media coverage of the president’s travels “can be a useful way to highlight some of the more interesting things that are going on all across the country.”
“Boise and Boise State are doing a lot of interesting work in the tech sector, in the tech community in Boise, in training people at Boise State for good jobs,” a senior administration official told the Statesman Washington Bureau on Tuesday.?“So it’s a great example (of) what we’re talking about.”
Traveling to the red states of Idaho and Kansas is part of a deliberate strategy to “reach out to everybody,”?the administration said.
“Idaho is a state that has a Republican governor,” Earnest told the Statesman. “It has Republican members of Congress and Republican senators. But yet it’s a state that recognizes how important a good education is, particularly an education in the engineering field. Investing in these kinds of programs and investing in college education doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. It certainly isn’t a partisan issue when you go out to Idaho, and it shouldn’t be a partisan issue here in Washington, D.C.”
Idaho issues
Earnest said the president “is genuinely looking forward” to visiting Boise.“He did campaign there as a candidate for president in early 2008. The president often talks about how the American West has some of the more scenic locales in the country. And so the president is always looking forward to an opportunity to head out West, and he’s certainly looking forward to doing so tomorrow.”
Earnest said the president would highlight his community college proposal in his Boise remarks. Two other issues of interest to Idahoans:
— The president’s proposal to take executive action on removing the threat of deportation for undocumented immigrants. A recent Pew center study found that 46 percent of Idaho’s undocumented immigrant population could be eligible for the president’s deportation-relief plan.
Earnest said he wasn’t sure whether the president would discuss immigration in Boise.
— The president, Earnest said, “doesn’t have any announcements” planned Wednesday regarding the Boulder-White Clouds in Central Idaho. Many groups want him to declare the area a national monument.
More on Boise State’s College of Engineering:
About 70 percent of engineering undergraduates here at Boise State work in research labs or in internships with local industry.
The number of engineering graduates has doubled since 2000.
The college ranks in the top 10 percent in the country for the proportion of women faculty members — vital in bringing more women and minority students into the industry.
The faculty and students are committed to boosting STEM education at all levels, and work with teachers around the state to improve science, technology, engineering and math curricula.
More on the College of Business & Economics
Home of the Small Business Development Center, TechHelp and the TECenter — all partnerships aimed at boosting local companies and the economy.
The college is housed in the $28.8 million Micron Business and Economics Building, itself the result of a major donation from private industry, and home to high-tech classrooms; the open, flexible and creativity-inspiring Imagination Lab, a 250-person lecture hall and executive MBA boardrooms.
The Responsible Business Initiative works to further embed personal, social, environmental and cultural responsibility into all levels of Boise State’s business education. The initiative supports the expansion of B Corps in Idaho, connects people to resources on corporate sustainability and resource management and more.
©2015 The Idaho Statesman (Boise, Idaho)
