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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 1998: article | |
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Benefitting students and industry Penn State/Hewlett-Packard partnership By Barbara K. Kennedy | ||||||
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Penn State students are getting hands-on experience with industry-standard equipment, which also is being used by Hewlett-Packard customers and Penn State trainees earning Penn State continuing education credits in one of several multi-day workshops primarily for industry employees. “Our partnership with Hewlett-Packard has allowed us to bring late-model chromatographs to Penn State that are exactly the kind of instruments our students will find when they get jobs in chemical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, environmental and many other types of companies,” Howard Grotch, interim dean of the Eberly College of Science, said. Chromatographs are standard analytical tools—as essential in chemistry laboratories as computers are in administrative offices. Designed for separating mixtures into their components and measuring the amount of those components, chromatographs are used to analyze such materials as blood and urine in the law enforcement industry and discharges from municipal treatment plants in the environmental protection industry, as well as to monitor chemical reactions during manufacturing processes. “Every university in the country has tremendous difficulties in keeping pace with the industry standard in analytical chemistry equipment,” Dr. Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director, Division of Continuing Education, said. “Our unique agreement with Hewlett-Packard now gives Penn State students this competitive advantage in a way that makes financial sense and doesn’t add to the costs of the Department of Chemistry. This is just the kind of partnership we want to encourage with Penn State’s academic units.” Under the Penn State/Hewlett-Packard agreement, the University is purchasing chromatographs that previously were used at the Hewlett-Packard training facility in Atlanta, Ga., which provides workshops for its customers on specific chromatograph models. Penn State’s revenue from teaching the Hewlett-Packard workshops will be used to pay for the equipment, the salaries of University workshop faculty and laboratory renovations. As part of the agreement, Hewlett-Packard trainees in workshops taught either at the Atlanta facility or at Penn State can receive Penn State continuing education credits. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced new models of chromatographs to the marketplace and needed training space for the new models in Atlanta. “Penn State acquired the models that were moved out of the Atlanta facility, which are only one generation behind the absolute state of the art, but they are the Hewlett-Packard chromatographs most industry labs currently own,” Dick Henry, lecturer in chemistry and director of analytical chemistry laboratories, said. “Our goal is to work closely with all the faculty who teach chemistry-related undergraduate lab courses so our undergraduates get maximum use of the chromatographs whenever Hewlett-Packard’s customers are not using them.” The Eberly College of Science and Outreach and Cooperative Extension funded the use of this equipment during the program’s initial, successful evaluation phase, which began in fall 1996. An outreach program of the Eberly College of Science | |||||
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