{"id":36541,"date":"2025-07-10T18:05:44","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T22:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=36541"},"modified":"2025-07-10T18:05:46","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T22:05:46","slug":"grad-aims-to-take-manufacturing-engineering-by-storm-with-help-from-chamber-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/grad-aims-to-take-manufacturing-engineering-by-storm-with-help-from-chamber-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"Grad aims to take manufacturing, engineering by storm with help from Chamber scholarship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s never a waste of time to develop your passions; they could give you a clear idea of your own path ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has always been a front-of-mind idea for St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School student John Szewczyk. Now, as he prepares to embark on his post-secondary education at the University of Ottawa to study engineering, he\u2019s doing so with a firm focus on manufacturing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufacturing is an area that sometimes takes a back seat to design, he says, but that certainly isn\u2019t the perspective of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce and sponsor Bunn-o-matic, which recently came together to present John with their annual Manufacturing Scholarship of $5,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy teacher told me about the [scholarship] as I had been doing competitions and stuff for the school including the robotics team and we also did a coding competition. Because she knows I enjoy that field\u2026she said I should apply,\u201d says John. \u201cI\u2019m going to be studying electrical engineering, so I learned about machining, how to operate a CNC, and I learned a lot about manufacturing just through doing and I kind of built a passion for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy end goal is to get into chip design, so someone like AMD or IBM, designing chips for them, whether it be graphics, or components and CPUs, more with computer electronics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expanding on the idea that some people might be more focused on the design of a product rather than its manufacture, he says \u201cmore people care about the end product rather than the process it takes to actually make the chip.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo one will care that it required all these machines and all these separate processes to make sure the chip was effective, would work properly, or be up to spec,\u201d he says. \u201cMost people would care \u2018an engineer at AMD designed this\u2019 and not \u2018an engineer at AMD made sure this could be made 1,000 times for this customer in this state.\u2019 More is put into the end product and not into the manufacturing process that was required to [be undertaken] to actually make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’s not sure what can be done immediately to ignite interest in the other direction amongst the designers and manufacturers of tomorrow, but one suggestion he has is to encourage schools to take their students on tours of facilities that interest them, showing how a product is made from start to finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A simple step, he contends, is a bit of advice he\u2019d like to pass on to students who are just a month-and-a-half away from starting their high school journeys: \u201cFocus on the academics, but also focus on your passions and developing them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI find a lot of people will focus so much on academics, but going to university, they have no idea what they want to do, so they just go and get a general degree, and that\u2019s great, but it would be even better if you know what your degree [will] be in,\u201d he says. \u201cMaybe in general, instead of Grade 8 where it\u2019s a focus on \u2018I need to be studying every day, all day in Grade 9\u2019 to do whatever, it should focus on, \u2018Maybe I should do some extracurriculars and figure out what I like doing.\u2019 Maybe it\u2019s some volunteering [at a place tied into your interests].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere should be more focus on this industry. There\u2019s a lot of potential in manufacturing and I feel a lot of it is [overshadowed] because people care about the engineering and more the business side of it; I really care about the actual manufacturing process. I feel like we\u2019re going to see a lot of change in manufacturing just because of AI and all the different models they have now and I think a lot more people should be more interested in manufacturing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s never a waste of time to develop your passions; they could give you a clear idea of your own path ahead. This has always been a front-of-mind idea for St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School student John Szewczyk. Now, as he prepares to embark on his post-secondary education at the University of Ottawa to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":36542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/2025-07-10-04.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-9vn","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 00:44:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36543,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36541\/revisions\/36543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}