Academies Partner CMC Getting Help From CAD Students
February 12, 2024 - The tape measure is stretched along the hallway wall at CMC Rebar’s Louisville office, a Jeffersontown High School student holding each end. “It’s 121 inches,” Lauren Duffy told her partner, Joseph McCoy. “Good thing we double-checked it,” Joseph said.
The high school juniors are two of the eight students in J-town’s Building and Design Academy who are working with CMC to reconfigure its office space.
“The students are connecting what they’ve learned in the classroom and applying it,” said their teacher, Jason Stepp. “This is huge for them – a business partner providing real-world experience for them.”
CMC Rebar is an international company that recycles and manufacturers steel. It has 45 employees at its Louisville location, several of whom are getting ready to retire at a time CMC is looking to expand. That’s why Jennifer Wiggins, the company’s area engineering manager, sought out the Academies of Louisville at the 2021 JCPS Showcase of Schools – to see if CMC could find JCPS Academies schools with students who might become future employees.
But Wiggins also needed to redesign CMC’s office space. Some employees are already cramped in spaces along a narrow hallway that weren’t meant to be offices. Bringing in any additional employees would create more of a space crunch. So, during Wiggins’ budding relationship-building with Jeffersontown High, she discovered the school had a Building and Design Academy that included a Computer Aided Design (CAD) pathway. It was a perfect match.
“We’ve got to figure out a way to reconfigure our space to handle our growth,” Wiggins said. “So, we asked these students to tackle it. They are saving us time that we can spend on other jobs and they have been fantastic.”
The students have made a couple of trips to CMC, talking to Wiggins to see what the company is hoping to do, looking at the available space and taking and retaking measurements. They’re taking those measurements back to school, entering them in their CAD system and coming up with drawings and floor plans to share with CMC.
“This project directly applies to what we’re been doing in class,” Lauren said. “It’s great real-world experience outside the classroom.”
Lauren hopes to use what she’s learning to pursue a career as an architect or a civil engineer.
Wiggins said CMC hopes to take the students’ plans, get company approval and hire a contractor to carry out the students’ work.
“The students know what they’re doing,” Wiggins said. “It’s been exciting to watch them in action. The plans we’ve seen so far look great.”
By Mark Hebert