Southern Polytechnic is a unique university in
the state of Georgia in that we focus on
the application of engineering principles
to what I would consider more of
an applied engineering degree as opposed to
a more of a research oriented degree.
Imagine going out and learning how to drive a car,
but never getting in the car.
Just learning from the book.
And then one day somebody says
you've gotta go to the store.
So you go to the -- Go get in your car, you go to the store.
But you've never driven a car before.
Well, there's many, many engineering
institutions where all they
do is study engineering principles.
You go to work on day one.
And what do you do?
You start trying to apply those principles,
but you've never applied them.
And so what we focus on is that mixing of application.
We teach you to drive as you study how to drive.
We teach you as in the case here,
we're standing in our machine shop in
the Mechanical Engineering Technology department.
We have milling machines lays.
Many people think, when they
think of mechanical engineering technology,
they think of auto machine or auto mechanics,
machinist, and things like that.
But that's not what it's really about.
What it's really about is understanding
machining principles so that I can design properly.
If I don't understand how to make something,
there's no way I can design something.
So we teach you enough about how to make
something so that when it comes down to design,
you can properly design.
So that's sort of like what we do here.
We have a multitude of ways of teaching applications.
We teach the students here how to weld.
We teach them how to do milling work,
lathe work, machine work.
A lot of other cutting principles.
We also have competition teams that are very
important to the part of
education here. Competition teams,
what they do is not
only allow you to have some fun through competition,
but it's also educational competition.
Meaning what we do is we have
the Formula SAE race car team that competes
intercollegiately, internationally with other colleges
across the nation in trying to
design the best racecar they can.
And our team has had phenomenal success,
I believe y'all'll be talking to those folks later.
We have an aerial robotics team who has
also done a phenomenal job in
terms of application engineering.
We do excellent in our competitions.
The reason is, is because we teach
applications as we teach engineering principles,
the big value in that is as to the employer as well.
Not only do our teams compete very successfully,
because our guys know
how to weld, they know how to do machine shop.
Imagine competing against other
schools where they don't do welding,
they don't do machining, but they've gotta build
something. It's a challenge.
Well, our guys put it all together,
one package, our teams
have it all put together one package.
And so they are able to really be very, very competitive.
But not only on these competition teams,
they're very competitive in the job force. We have many,
many employers tell us time and
again how our graduates hit the ground,
ready to be productive because they
understand the application of engineering principles.
So from an, from that perspective,
I don't think there's
a better institution that you can go
to in terms of learning the application of principles.
As you've learned the theory of the principles.