
Monday, June 5, 2006 - 13:29
Blogging from Bio-Link, part I
I am currently in Berkeley attending the 2006 Bio-Link summer fellows' workshop. It's hard to believe that it's been eight years since the first workshop was held. We're still meeting here in the same lovely Clark Kerr Center and I'm still, as every year, awed by the amount of initiative and drive that I see in the group of people that converge on this place from around the country.
Who would have thought that biotechnology education could inspire this kind of odd combination of family reunion and revival meeting?
Why would anyone hire your graduates?
When I first starting teaching biotechnology classes, in 1991 at Seattle Central Community College, we had people from local companies and some Universities questioning the need for a program like ours. Some industry scientists questioned where students would work with a community college biotech degree. What would they be qualified to do? Some thought we were delusional. "There aren't jobs in biotech," they said, "Companies start up and go out of business all the time. Your students will never be employed unless they have a bachelor's degree."
Of course, we never expected that such a large fraction of our students would come to us after completing their bachelor's degrees. Neither did we anticipate the tremendous growth that biotechnology would see in some parts of the country.
What is Bio-Link?
Bio-Link is one a few Advanced Technology Education (ATE) centers around the nation. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the ATE centers began as a result of a congressional mandate in 1992 to start taking advantage of community college expertise in preparing the workforce for emerging technologies. ATE centers and projects focus on educating students for the technology-intensive fields that drive the economy.
Bio-Link's mission is to strengthen and expand biotechnology technician education at community and technical colleges. As part of this mission, Bio-Link has worked to:
- Enlarge and diversify the technician workforce
- Meet industry's growing needs to trained technicians
- Make high quality training available to all students in all areas of biotechnology.
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