Students explore career options at ReadyCT's Manufacturing Roadshow hosted by Quinnipiac University
Even if those people are still in school, like Jackson Virtue. He's a senior and captain of the Middletown High School robotics team.
Commuters can get to Grand Central from New Haven in 90 minutes thanks to super express train, DOT says
'So, I've learned a lot of technical abilities,' Virtue said. 'I use my hands a lot. So, when I'm putting the bot together, I'm very good at putting stuff together.'
Those are exactly the skills needed by today's manufacturers. Quinnipiac is stressing what's different in 21st-century manufacturing.
'So many robotics, cobotics, so many great opportunities that you wouldn't think of as the typical dirty shop floor in the past,' said Prof. Lynn Byers, who is the University's Director of Mechanical Engineering.
On the floor of the Arena, an estimated 1,100 students are learning about their possible futures.
'All about manufacturing, and all about different companies around Connecticut, and maybe even getting a little job here just manufacturing stuff,' said Cheshire High School Junior Jacob Rivera.
Just about everything we use every day was manufactured somewhere, and here in Connecticut things are manufactured that can take you deep underwater, or even to the moon. NASA is working on the Artemis mission to send astronauts to live on the moon. That mission needs equipment and people to make it.
'What's key about keeping our country on the forefront of competition when it comes to the space race and working with companies across the nation is getting kids into that area, right?' said Keegan Jackson, Resident Manager, Space Launch System at NASA's Artemis Mission. 'So, we want kids to be inspired to go into manufacturing.'
There are already 4,800 manufacturers in Connecticut, a number that could grow based on federal trade policy.
'So, we're looking at how we can continue to invest in the manufacturing sector to be able to bring manufacturing back to Connecticut, based on what's happening at the federal level, as it relates to tariffs and things like that,' said the state's Chief Manufacturing Officer, Paul Lavoie.
Which means more demand for young minds to consider manufacturing careers.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
Job approval for congressional Democrats hits all-time low: ‘Flat out terrible'
How low can they go? The job approval rating for congressional Democrats has plunged to another all-time low, with fewer than 2 in 10 Americans happy with their work on Capitol Hill. Only 19% of registered voters approve of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their job, a Quinnipiac University Poll released Wednesday found. The dismal rating for congressional Dems is the lowest ever recorded by the pollster, which first began asking the question in 2009. 3 The 19% approval rating for congressional Dems is the lowest ever recorded by the Quinnipiac University Poll. Getty Images Even among Democratic voters, a majority (52%) disapprove of congressional Democrats, with only 39% satisfied. 'If the approval numbers for Republicans are bad … then the approval numbers for Democrats can be characterized as flat out terrible,' Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said in a statement. Overall, one-third of voters (33%) approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, while 62% disapprove. Among Republican voters, 77% approve of the job GOP members have done in Congress, while only 20% disapprove. 3 Democrats have been mired in low approval ratings since Trump took office. AP The survey of nearly 1,300 registered voters was conducted between July 10 and 14, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cleared Congress without any Democratic support. Republicans in Congress also appear poised to pass a $9.4 billion rescissions package this week that will claw back funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Since Inauguration Day, Congressional Democrats have appeared incapable of slowing down President Trump from implementing his second-term agenda. Democrats lost control of the Senate and Republicans made gains in the House after the November elections. The party has appeared rudderless, with no clear leader stepping up to lead Democrats through the latest Trump era – and polls have consistently reflected that voters have little confidence in members of the blue party. 3 77% of Republicans approve of Republicans in Congress, whereas only 39% of Democrats are happy with the performance of Democrats on Capitol Hill. Getty Images Confidence in Democratic congressional leadership plummeted to an all-time low of 25% in April, according to a Gallup poll. Among younger Americans – those under 30 – just 23% approve of congressional Democrats, according to a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics survey from April. The April polls were conducted after Democrats in Congress failed to stop a GOP-backed spending bill, which also averted a government shutdown. Congressional Democrats also hit a previous low-water mark in polling back in March, when two punishing surveys – from CNN and NBC News – measured their favorability rating at just 29% and their approval rating at only 27%, respectively.
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Astronomers capture the birth of numerous planets outside our solar system
The observations offer a unique glimpse into the inner workings of an emerging planetary system, said the University of Chicago's Fred Ciesla, who was not involved in the study appearing in the journal Nature. Advertisement 'This is one of the things we've been waiting for. Astronomers have been thinking about how planetary systems form for a long period of time,' Ciesla said. 'There's a rich opportunity here.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up NASA's Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory in Chile teamed up to unveil these early nuggets of planetary formation around the young star known as HOPS-315. It's a yellow dwarf in the making like the sun, yet much younger at 100,000 to 200,000 years old and some 1,370 light-years away. A single light-year is 6 trillion miles. In a cosmic first, McClure and her team stared deep into the gas disk around the baby star and detected solid specks condensing — signs of early planet formation. A gap in the outer part of the disk allowed them to gaze inside, thanks to the way the star tilts toward Earth. Advertisement They detected silicon monoxide gas as well as crystalline silicate minerals, the ingredients for what's believed to be the first solid materials to form in our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. The action is unfolding in a location comparable to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, containing the leftover building blocks of our solar system's planets. The condensing of hot minerals was never detected before around other young stars, 'so we didn't know if it was a universal feature of planet formation or a weird feature of our solar system,' McClure wrote in an email. 'Our study shows that it could be a common process during the earliest stage of planet formation.' While other research has looked at younger gas disks and, more commonly, mature disks with potential planet wannabes, there has been no specific evidence for the start of planet formation until now, McClure said. In a stunning picture taken by the ESO's ALMA telescope network, the emerging planetary system resembles a lightning bug glowing against the black void. It's impossible to know how many planets might form around HOPS-315. With a gas disk as massive as the sun's might have been, it could also wind up with eight planets a million or more years from now, according to McClure. Purdue University's Merel van 't Hoff, a co-author, is eager to find more budding planetary systems. By casting a wider net, astronomers can look for similarities and determine which processes might be crucial to forming Earth-like worlds. 'Are there Earth-like planets out there, or are we ... so special that we might not expect it to occur very often?' Advertisement
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
If aliens existed on Mars 3.7 billion years ago, they would have needed umbrellas
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mars was a rainier, wetter place than planetary scientists previously thought, according to a new study of ancient, inverted river channels that span more than 9,000 miles (14,484 kilometers) in the Red Planet's southern Noachis Terra region. "Our work is a new piece of evidence that suggests that Mars was once a much more complex and active planet than it is now, which is such an exciting thing to be involved in," study leader Adam Losekoot of the U.K.'s Open University said in a statement. We've known Mars was once a wet planet ever since the Mariner 9 orbiter mission from the '70s photographed a surface covered in dried-up river channels. These channels were dated back to over 3.5 billion years ago. However, channels cut into the ground are not the only evidence for running water on Mars. When that water ran-off, or evaporated, it left sedimentary deposits. Sometimes we see these in craters that were once lakes filled with water: NASA's Curiosity rover is exploring Gale Crater, which has a central three-mile-tall (five-kilometer-tall) peak covered in sediment. Other times, these sediments were laid down on river beds. Over the eons, the sediments would have hardened, while the river channels and the land around them would have weathered and eroded away. That left the sediments, which are more resistant to erosion, sticking out as tall ridges. Geologists today call them fluvial sinuous ridges, or, more plainly, inverted channels. Now, Losekoot, who is a Ph.D. student, has led the discovery of a vast network of these channels in Noachis Terra based on images and data taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the defunct Mars Global Surveyor mission. Previously, Noachis Terra had not been given due attention because it lacked the more classical river channels that form more obvious evidence of water. However, by mapping the network of inverted channels, Losekoot realized there was lots of evidence there had once been plentiful water in the region. "Studying Mars, particularly an under-explored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it's an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years," said Losekoot. "It's a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn't possible here on Earth." Some of the inverted channels appear as isolated segments that have survived the elements for billions of years. Others are more intact, forming systems that run for hundreds of miles and stand tens of yards tall. Such a widespread network of inverted channels does not suggest these channels were caused by flash floods, argues Losekoot. Rather, they seem to have formed in stable climatic conditions over a geologically significant period of time during the Noachian–Hesperian transition, which was the shift from one geological era into the next around 3.7 billion years ago. What's particularly intriguing is the most likely source of water to have formed these inverted channels is precipitation — be it rain, hail or snow. Indeed, given the size of the inverted channel network in Noachis Terra, this region of Mars may have experienced lots of rainy days in a warm and wet climate. RELATED STORIES — Carbon dioxide rivers? Ancient Mars liquid may not all have been water — Good news for life: Mars rivers flowed for long stretches long ago — Mars Had Big Rivers for Billions of Years It's more evidence that Mars was once more like Earth than the cold and barren desert it is today. Losekoot presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting held at the University of Durham in the U.K., which ran between July 7 and July 11. Solve the daily Crossword
