What being a BUILD mentor means to you

Mentors are the center of the BUILD program.

We found that the main challenge employers have with new graduates is that they do not know how to do anything. They know how to theorize and calculate, but things they design don’t work in the real world. That’s OK, because they can’t be manufactured anyway.

So the first thing employers have to do is send their new employees through training programs. This is what the BUILD founders did for a living during their second careers - taught new employees what they needed to know to do their jobs. Then we got asked by our customers, “Why don’t you go teach all these things in undergraduate programs so we don’t have to do it here?”

Good question! The answer is that schools cannot do this because professors don’t typically have the manufacturing experience they need to teach this. This is where BUILD program mentors come in - mentors teach what it’s like to be real-world engineer.

The BUILD program aims to revolutionize engineering departments across the nation by supplementing the important theoretical aspects of a traditional engineering program with practical engineering concepts sought by 21st century employers. We do this by having experienced industry mentors teach alongside professors. Some mentors have been professors or TA’s, but most work in or are retired from industry.

The four sequential “building” courses put students in a professional engineering environment threaded through all four undergraduate years. Although students may be physically at school, in spirit they are working at a small startup company solving real-world problems under guidance of you, their mentor, a senior engineer. You are part of the students’ teams working in multi-discipline engineering teams and interacting with team members continuously, encouraging collaboration and network building.

You will work with them holding interactive design reviews, helping them getting things to work, testing the #$@^& out of their projects (you get to break all their stuff!), and showing them how to make things manufacturable and reliable.

Certified mentors are at the center of the program. You will personally complete the projects in their entirety three times – once working with instructors during your mentor training program, once on your own at the BUILD training facility, and once independently at your home training site using your tools, components, and infrastructure. You’ll be given non-working systems to diagnose with a variety of issues spanning electrical, software, mechanical, and other problems such as cracked solder joints, defective components, broken/shorted traces, broken linkages, excessive backlash, and software driver issues. You will teach students the art of diagnosis, debugging, and repair. The mentor cadre can facilitate all parts of this project to success.

The culmination of the BUILD program is a sustained path for highly capable engineers at universities, sponsor facilities, and industry.

Summary: What’s in this for you?

If you go through the BUILD program mentor training, you and network with other mentors and be part of a highly capable elite team. We have found our mentors to be the most capable team of people we’ve ever met.