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If you are a community college faculty member who has hesitated to apply for an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) because you are not sure how to proceed, a Mentor-Connect application would be a great place to start. But you've got to get going.

Applications for Mentor-Connect are due at 5 p.m. on October 15. The application and instructions are at http://teachingtechnicians.org/

Twenty community colleges will be selected by November 8 to receive mentoring and technical support from Mentor-Connect to help prepare full proposals for the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE program track.

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Judith Ramaley was new in her position as assistant director of the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation when she attended her first Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference in the fall of 2001.

For some time before the meeting she had been thinking about SMET. Not only did she dislike the sound of the acronym then used to refer to science, math, engineering and technology, it was not logical to her either. Switching the order of the letters to make science and math cradle engineering and technology made more sense to her.

Ramaley had not planned to share her opinion about SMET with the ATE principal investigators; however, something at the meeting prompted her seemingly spontaneous comment that she did not like the acronym and thought it should be changed to STEM. It was the first public meeting where she or anyone else is known to have suggested STEM as the acronym of science, technology, engineering and math.

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Since it was funded in 2004 as an ATE regional center, the Convergence Technology Center (CTC) has used a Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) to identify new technologies and economic trends that influence what technicians need to know.

Ann Beheler, executive director of Emerging Technology Grants at Collin College, calls the BILT process the "secret sauce" of CTC's up-to-date curriculum and faculty development programs.

"That is integral," she said. "If you pick one thing that absolutely has to be there to keep up with curriculum that changes as much as our does, the BILT leadership has to be there."

The CTC's BILT has taken on a national flavor since 2012, when it received funding as a national Advanced Technological Education center. That same year, Collin College in Frisco, Texas, where CTC is based, received a $19.9 million Department of Labor grant for the National Information, Security, and Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC). The large Department of Labor grant program is known as TAACCCT for Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training.

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The education of building technicians—people who operate the electrical and mechanical systems within skyscrapers and industrial facilities—is critical for long-term energy conservation and efforts to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels. Forty percent of the nation's energy use and 40 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions come from buildings.

The energy efficiency of buildings depends largely on the skills of building technicians, because even new buildings will not run efficiently if technicians do not operate their systems properly.

For this reason the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center at Laney College, in Oakland, California, has developed close partnerships with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These partnerships add the latest energy efficiency research to the working knowledge of technicians who operate large commercial buildings and the community college instructors who teach building technicians.

In the photo, Andrea Mercado, a senior research associate in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shares her research on energy-usage benchmarking with instructors at a BEST Center workshop in June.

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The Laboratory Science Program at Northern Essex Community College was a long-awaited “perfect” fit for Lindsey Curole.

Curole always wanted to work in a laboratory. But when Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans apartment, it forced a several-year delay in her education plans as she relocated with relatives in different parts of the country and worked to get back on track financially. Six months after settling in Massachusetts with her boyfriend and getting a job as a hardware store cashier, Curole was able to enroll as an in-state student at Northern Essex Community College.

She chose NECC’s Laboratory Science program, after looking at several community colleges, because of the versatile skills it teaches. “We spent a lot of time in the lab and working on projects. I liked it that it was more hands-on,” Curole said.

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As space exploration becomes more of a commercial enterprise in the U.S., the need for well-qualified aerospace technicians may be even greater than it was when NASA and its contractors were the primary employers in this field.

Working as an aerospace technician requires "a broad skill set, a particular level of attention to detail and a thorough understanding of safety,” said Steve Kane, managing director and program manager for SpaceTEC^?. Kane explained that aerospace technicians must be constantly aware of the fact they deal with things that can harm them and that the products they build must work properly to avoid endangering the public.

The SpaceTEC ATE National Resource Center links community and technical college aerospace technician education programs together in a national infrastructure. Its partners, since it was first funded by NSF in 2002, include NASA, the large companies with which NASA has contracted, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. military.

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Bellevue College’s Life Science Informatics Center meshed an Advanced Technological Education project grant with two large federal grants to create an industry-recognized credential, preparatory curriculum, and set of career pathways for people who want to become health information technology (IT) technicians.

The three grants—totaling nearly $20 million since 2010—build on the expertise that the college gained by operating the National Workforce Center in Emerging Technologies, which was funded by the National Science Foundation from 1995 to 2002 as a national ATE center.

“All of our efforts were informed by that center. It was a huge stimulus to our college and for our learners,” said Patricia Dombrowski, director of the Life Science Informatics Center at the Washington state college. “It’s been almost astounding how all these pieces have fit together,” she added.

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Thanks to the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program, Mike Rudibuagh 's high-level collaborations with educators appear on a map like a giant spider web stretched across the country and with geospatial industry leaders in Illinois.

For Lake Land College students, Rudibaugh's professional network puts the most current geospatial technologies in their hands. It also keeps the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program up-to-date in ways that help students get jobs—often directly from internships that are part of the college's GIS certificate program—or transfer smoothly to four-year degree programs. That's a big change since 2002 when Rudibaugh's one GIS course had few students and he struggled to show colleagues in other departments how helpful GIS knowledge could be for them and their students.

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Conor Delaney sure is glad his aunt read the newspaper on July 27, 2009, when it ran an article about the College of Lake County launching a Lasers, Photonics, and Optics program with ATE grant support.

The certificate program taught Delaney how to use his hands-on aptitude in cutting-edge science.

In 2009 Delaney had changed majors a couple times at Harper College, the community college near his home in Illinois. He had landed there after struggling with the pace and theoretical focus of courses at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. During a mechanical engineering internship in the summer after his freshman year at Milwaukee, he had found himself much more interested in the work going on in the machine shop than in checking designs at his desk.

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The SC ATE National Resource Center for Expanding Excellence in Technician Education launched a searchable Compendium of Research on Technician Education in mid-July.

The compendium is the first phase of a Proven and Promising Practices database at www.TeachingTechnicians.org (menu choice, lower right-hand corner of Homepage).

The compendium currently contains 332 entries of published research on technician education and related topics of interest to the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) community, its stakeholders, and other educators. Relevant content from peer-reviewed scholarly journals and other sources will be added as they come to the team’s attention.