Photo courtesy of Lake Shore Cryotronics
Shoring Up Interest
Westerville technology manufacturer hosts visits from high school students
The Hubble Telescope, used to capture many of the most captivating images of deep space.
The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018 and set to be the successor of the Hubble.
The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a mechanism used to work on unsolved questions of the laws of physics.
What do these three things have in common?
They all contain components that were manufactured in Westerville, and once a year, local students have the chance to see where they were made.
The company responsible for those components is Lake Shore Cryotronics, which has been in Westerville since the late 1970s and in its current McCorkle Boulevard location since the early 2000s. Lake Shore produces devices that measure the thermal, electronic and magnetic properties of materials at very low temperatures, including the magnetic materials essential for computers to work.
The company’s customers are mostly scientific researchers working in higher academia, national laboratories and high-technology industry.
Photo courtesy of Lake Shore Cryotronics
Shoring Up Interest
One day each fall, though, the doors of Lake Shore open to high school juniors and sophomores from Westerville and the surrounding area.
Lake Shore Cryotronics Student Day has been a tradition since 2008, with the company inviting students in AP physics, material science and chemistry classes to tour its facility.
This fall’s visit will be in October.
Attendance is officially capped at 75 students, but it has managed to climb as high as 120.
“As a company, we tend to be pretty engaged with the community,” says Brad Dodrill, vice president of sales and senior scientist. “We try to make it as palatable as possible.”
Students are divided into six or seven groups and taken to seven different stations representing various parts of the company. At each, an expert in that field tells students about the product or service represented and the skills necessary to produce it.
These stations include sensor design and fabrication, probe stations and material characterizations systems.
“It’s more of applying how chemistry is used in the real world,” says Minnie Herrick, a chemistry teacher at Westerville Central High School.
There are few ways for high school students to see facilities like Lake Shore, Herrick says, and during the annual visit, the Lake Shore workers “tried to bring it to our level as much as possible.”
“It helps them all to to see the world in a different way,” says Beth Eddy, a teacher of materials science and chemistry at Westerville South High School.
Her students were able to see the degree of expertise that goes into making manufacturing work, she says, as well as the passion that scientists and engineers have for what they do.
Some students who have visited Lake Shore have gone on to intern at the company.
Francis Pellicciaro is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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