Kennametal program sheds light on engineering to Greater Latrobe students

Greater Latrobe High School senior Victoria Scalamogna on Wednesday was at Kennametal Inc.'s Unity offices where her father, Vincent, used to work, but it wasn't for nostalgia.

She joined 36 fellow classmates to learn about engineering careers.

“There are so many different fields. I think it is fascinating,” she said at the Young Engineers Program career fair.

Scalamogna, who wants to attend Penn State University, is interested in mechanical or biomedical engineering because of the stability those careers offer.

“Some jobs won't be here, (but) you can use engineering forever. Engineers will be here to solve problems,” she said.

The Young Engineers Program Kennametal started in 2011 with the school gives students “the opportunity to meet with engineers and actually experience participating in engineering activities,” said Cynthia Pompelia, a Greater Latrobe math teacher and one of the program leaders.

About 200 students have participated in the 15-week program at Kennametal's local offices and at its plant in Solon, Ohio, which started its program in 2012.

Justin Pierce is a senior who plans to study aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the Georgia Institute of Technology. The opportunity “to get hands-on experience with an engineering project” is important, he said.

Jacob Etling, a senior whose father, Scott, is a Kennametal employee, echoed Pierce's sentiments about the program.

“You can't create a real business environment a mile down the road in the classroom,” Etling said.

The program will take the students to a manufacturing plant in Bedford. They will learn about thermal imaging, repair a turkey bone and in a group project will create a device to toss a bean bag with accuracy and precision, Pompelia said.

“It gives students an opportunity to see a real working environment” for engineers, in a different setting than in the classroom, said Stanton Glamp, a technology teacher and one of the program leaders.

Students in the program have shown an interest in pursuing a career where employment is expected to increase by 3 percent for the next eight years, adding about 67,200 new jobs in the fields of architecture and engineering, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The salary for those in various engineering fields ranges from a median pay of $83,590 for mechanical engineers to $129,990 for petroleum engineers, the bureau determined in a May 2015 survey.

About one-third of the students in the Young Engineers Program are female. In previous years, about half of the participants were female, said Pompelia, who was the only woman in a group of about 20 engineers when she worked for a Boston firm before entering teaching 19 years ago.

Students who go through the program and then study engineering in college are far more likely to remain in the field than those who enter schools without the benefits of such a program, Pompelia said.

Both sons of Jerry Hanna, a sales director at Kennametal, went through the program and are studying engineering — Drew at Georgia Tech and Nick at Penn State.

“It prepared them for college,” the father said.

Joe Napsha is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-836-5252.