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It\u2019s always nice to be appreciated. Just ask Kent Allison. He\u2019s an instructor and the Department Chair of the Technology and Engineering department<\/a> at Mountain Vista High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. This past fall, he was delighted to receive an email from a former student, James Matsey. James was enrolled in Kent\u2019s technology classes from 2010 to 2014\u2014his entire high school career. After graduating from Colorado State University in the fall of 2019, James landed a job at Raytheon, designing drones. And he believes he would not have gotten his current job or any of his college if he did not have the advanced SOLIDWORKS skills he learned in Kent\u2019s classes.<\/p>\n When asked about Kent\u2019s classes and learning SOLIDWORKS in high school, James said, \u201cI was able to take an advanced SOLIDWORKS class where we were doing concurrent enrollment<\/a> [with local community college, Arapaho Community College], where you got high school credits as well as college credits.\u201d The final exam for the concurrent enrollment class is the Certified SOLIDWORKS Associate<\/a> exam (CSWA). James passed it with flying colors and went on to pass the Certified SOLDIWORKS Professional<\/a> exam (CSWP). After getting his job at Raytheon, he thought it would be nice to reach out to his former teacher and give something back to his high school\u2019s community.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen as often as you might think!\u201d laughed Kent, reflecting on James\u2019 email. He loves when his formers students send him updates on their lives\u2014it makes his day when he gets correspondences from students, and he\u2019s always excited to learn how his classes, especially those that focused on SOLIDWORKS, helped his students build their careers.<\/p>\n Kent knows about career building. He\u2019s been teaching for 19 years, starting as a business teacher at Heritage High School in Littleton, CO. While he was there, he saw SOLIDWORKS being used in woodshop, and something clicked. \u201cI was a business and computer teacher at the time, and then I saw [SOLIDWORKS] and I was like, \u2018This is what I want to do,\u2019\u201d he said. He went back to school to get his Master\u2019s degree in technology education. And then he was introduced to Mountain Vista High School.<\/p>\n When Kent started at Mountain Vista 14 years ago, there was no engineering program. \u201cIt was a blank slate,\u201d he recalled. Kent was able to build the school\u2019s technology and engineering program from the ground up. He started learning SOLIDWORKS, eventually becoming a CSWP and a SOLIDWORKS Accredited Educator<\/a>. He set up Mountain Vista\u2019s STEM LAB from nothing, and built what has become one of the most respected high school engineering programs in Colorado. His lab has eight 3D printers, a laser cutter, a slew of power tools, an electrical station, milling machines, and more. And he is also one of the leading SOLIDWORKS certification providers in the state of Colorado.<\/p>\n During the 2017-2018 school year, over 50 of Kent\u2019s students became SOLIDWORKS certified. This year past year, 2018-2019 he had 64. The number keeps growing, and with Colorado\u2019s Career Development Incentive Program<\/a>, Kent is excited to see more students grow with SOLIDWORKS. \u201c[The Career Development Incentive Program] has been unbelievable for our program and program\u2019s like ours,\u201d Kent explained, \u201cbecause the state pays the schools back $1,000 per certification.\u201d Once the district takes off money for the school\u2019s SOLIDWORKS subscription, Kent is left with tens of thousands of dollars to improve his program and his school. Now he can buy new equipment, fund more programs, and he used some of the money to buy his plane ticket to 3D<\/strong>EXPERIENCE World 2020<\/a> in Nashville, TN.<\/p>\n At the end of the semester, Kent hands each of his passing students a print out of their certification. It\u2019s a proud moment for him. \u201cI tell the kids, \u2018This is a huge thing that you\u2019re giving back to the school right now, and you get the benefits of being SOLIDWORKS certified in college,\u2019\u201d Kent said. Students who passed through his program were able to skip introductory design classes in college because they were SOLIDWORKS certified.<\/p>\n For an example, he told me about former student Cat Billings. Kent recently heard from Cate and learned she was accepted into the NASA funded Colorado Space Grant Consortium, where college students get to do hands-on space exploration work. She is currently working on a project called the Great Lunar Expedition for Everyone (GLEE), building a method for deploying 500 LunaSats on the moon. What\u2019s special about Cate? She\u2019s freshman at the University of Colorado. With the CSWA she earned in Kent\u2019s classes, she was set apart from the other applicants and is one of the few freshmen accepted into the program.<\/p>\n Cate came back to Mountain Vista High School to talk to Kent\u2019s current students about her experience. When he asked her if there were any classes that really helped her, she told his students, \u201cThe concurrent enrollment SOLIDWORKS class. It\u2019s pretty amazing. You should take it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think the way Kent offered [the SOLIDWORKS concurrent enrollment] class and gave kids the opportunity to learn software that\u2019s not just for education, but is something that\u2019s actually used in the workplace and used by professionals was refreshing and very valuable,\u201d said James Matsey, reflecting on his time with Kent. Beyond his work at Raytheon, James continues to use the skills he learned in high school: he utilized SOLIDWORKS to design a folding skateboard while he was in college. He\u2019s looking forward to perfecting the design and starting a Kickstarter to fund his project.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the kind of growth high school teachers love to see from their students. It\u2019s the kind of success a teacher like Kent loves to hear about, and loves knowing he had a part in. \u201cYou want the best for your students,\u201d he said. \u201cYou hear story after story about students\u2019 experience with SOLIDWORKS. It\u2019s tough to learn in the beginning, and then when students find out what it can do and the things they can make with it, it just opens their eyes.\u201d For him, seeing that impact is incredible. Having the opportunity to inspire kids to have a career in engineering, or even just make something, is amazing to him.<\/p>\n Learn more about certification<\/a> and becoming an Academic Certification Provider<\/a> today. And to all former students who had teacher in high school or college who helped inspire them, it\u2019s not a bad idea to shoot them a note and say hi.<\/p>\n Thank you to Kent Allison and James Matsey for taking the time to discuss their careers and experiences with one another and with SOLIDWORKS. All images courtesy of Kent Allison and James Matsey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kent Allison changed directions as a high school teacher when he discovered SOLIDWORKS. Now he is one of the leading SOLIDWORKS certification providers in Colorado and his students’ are able to grow their careers and skip college courses by becoming Certified SOLIDWORKS Associates (CSWA).<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":409,"featured_media":11789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4184,4183,5760,5204,5491,6712,5767,5206],"tags":[6896,4058,6899,6898,4039,4040,5290,5487,4022,6895,6894,6893,3931,4275,6897,4001,4019],"class_list":["post-11790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cad-instructor","category-cad-teacher","category-certification","category-curriculum-2","category-customer-stories","category-education","category-learned-solidworks-in-school","category-stem-teacher","tag-academic-certification-provider","tag-certification","tag-colorado","tag-concurrent-enrollment","tag-cswa","tag-cswp","tag-educator","tag-fab-lab","tag-high-school","tag-james-matsey","tag-kent-allison","tag-mountain-vista-high-school","tag-solidworks","tag-solidworks-education","tag-stem-lab","tag-student","tag-teacher"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/409"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11790"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11793,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790\/revisions\/11793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/3\/kent20allison.jpg\")
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