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68 SMT Magazine • February 2016 Normally, before independent accreditation is granted for a new school, you need a number of graduating classes. We do a one-page quarterly newsletter where I present a summary of the status of the school's development. It shares much of the same things we've talked about today. Also, if you go to our website, all the papers that we've written on this and technical subjects can be found under the "Resources" column. Goldman: You must be doing a lot of outreach? Borkes: In fact, we're going all over the country talking to high schools. It's fascinating to me, because if you think of education as a pipeline, these young kids at five years old enter the pipe- line. Our project addresses a specific part of the pipeline—the college undergraduate level. Our success is going to be largely a function of the quality of the people coming out of high school. One of the things that I have found in my trav- els, through being invited to speak at different high schools, is that there are high schools that offer robotics clubs, and they are getting stu- dents excited about automated, high-tech prod- uct assembly. Just to show them this stuff, and to let them know they could earn a high salary doing this someday, is exciting and eye-opening to them. That's the irony, right? We talk about competing with low labor-rate environments, but in this high-tech automation approach we need a small number of very highly skilled, cross-trained peo - ple to work on the manufacturing floor. This is another facet of the strategy that is interesting. In the United States, the academic year is 180 days. In South Korea the academic year is 250 days—that's 80 more days the stu- dents are going to school in South Korea. I've worked with Samsung, and I've worked with several other South Korean companies. If you look at Hyundai, Kia, and all these great South Korean companies, what you'll find is that the skill sets that their engineers have are re- ally geared towards manufacturing as an upper echelon engineering profession, whereas in this country, if you can't qualify to be a mechani- cal or electrical engineer, or computer scientist, you can always be a manufacturing engineer. One of our goals is to change that mentality. One way to change that is through automation and making sure the students understand the importance of the physics and science that goes into all of this. Our academic year will be on a trimester basis, 16 weeks each, so it's 48 weeks of intensive study. This comes very close to the 250 days in South Korea's school year. Goldman: It's also more like a real manufacturing environment—you don't get summers off. Borkes: That's a very astute observation. Since the for-profit business has to be taken care of to be successful, that's the calendar that the students' education is on as well. They'll play an integral part in the success of that classroom in which they're learning. They're able to not only apply part of their day to building products, but also to their class work. For instance, I'm designing two classes that have never been heard of: The Anat - omy of an Electronic Product, and the Formation of Technological Thought in the Western World. These are important, basic classes that the students will take early on, in their first trimester. That will set the scene for a lot of what we're go- ing to build. We've turned things upside down: where traditionally, you've had very smart pro- fessors, who are very good in their niche areas of science, math, economics, the humanities, or history, teach students the theory. Then, the students take that theory and go into the real world, and try to apply it somehow. How much they can apply is uncertain. There's not a good correspondence between the two. Goldman: No, there sure isn't. I remember taking " our success is going to be largely a function of the quality of the people coming out of high school. " tHe JeFFersoN ProJect, Part 2