2020 University Experience
MAGMA Foundry Technologies Inc. has provided educational licenses to universities in North America that offer a foundry focused degree program for many years. Our support of these programs has recently increased as we are now hosting an annual program that caters to the students working on these degrees in the universities that have our software.
On Friday January 31st MAGMA offered its second annual University Experience, our event started with a welcome reception on Thursday evening. The purpose of this program is to gather students together and get to know them better. More than that, we want to share with them a little about our background as an organization, the background and daily engineering tasks and responsibilities of some of the engineers at MAGMA, and work on a hands-on project with them. Our diverse staff has an interesting and varied history, and we are happy to share with the students how we got here, why we love what we do, and what keep us motivated in our current roles.
We give them a taste of the types of engineering projects we are involved in, show them how MAGMASOFT® is utilized in high level foundry engineering jobs, and relay the pleasure we find in solving the challenging issues the foundry world presents to us. Our hope is that these students will recognize our passion for metalcasting, and follow our lead to rewarding careers in this industry.
This event is not just a “show-and-tell” program. We challenge these students with an interactive casting rigging activity. The group is divided into teams, and we establish a friendly competition to design the best riser and chill combination for a steel casting. The students are competing against each other and competing against the genetic optimization algorithm built into MAGMASOFT®. In the end, we reward the team with the best design, and reveal to them how Autonomous Engineering™ gives MAGMASOFT® users a distinct advantage.
Participants included students from the following schools: Georgia Southern University, Iowa State University, Kent State University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Ohio State University, Pittsburg State University, Purdue University, Trine University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Wisconsin Platteville, and Virginia Tech.
We extend a sincere thank you to the 21 students who journeyed to our office, and allowed us the opportunity to have fun for a day. We look forward to next year’s MAGMA University Experience on January 28-29, 2021.
