The Little Shop Class That Could

How early career frustrations led a high school teacher to transform a trash heap of a shop class into a life-changing engineering academy.

By Robert Parks ('00, Mechanical Engineering)

My favorite times as a Cal Poly Pomona student was working in the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Baja team, where I helped build off-road vehicles for competition. I love building stuff and that’s just about all I did there. I designed parts on a computer, and machined and manufactured them through mills and lathes for cars that I saw rumble down dirt tracks.

The skills I learned, and the guidance of Cliff Stover [former director of the engineering projects lab], who advised the team at the time, shaped my early engineering career, providing me opportunities for jobs that would’ve been out of reach. To this day, I swear by these teams.

So, it seemed intuitive that my love for building stuff would translate to loving to build stuff while earning a good wage, but it didn’t work out that way. My first job as a biomedical engineer did nothing for me. Then I transitioned into a career as a race team engineer where I designed parts for motorcycles, ATVs, and off-road race vehicles. Watching those cars win races was great, but after working full-time in racing for nearly seven years, it didn’t rev my motor (pun-absolutely-intended). I still love to do it, and I work with race teams to this day. Just on a part-time, side hustle basis.

I was frustrated that my jobs weren’t as rewarding as I wanted. By either fate or random chance, I found a job opening as a shop teacher in Temescal Canyon High School in Lake Elsinore. I was hired with an emergency teaching credential. They trusted my experience, and few were willing to inherit the absolute train wreck of a shop. It was a total mess—disorganized and with few tools. I had to call my father in from Colorado to spend two weeks emptying cabinets of junk, cleaning, throwing out clutter, and making the shop presentable for the 180 students I would see the first day of school.

Every teacher will tell you that the first few years are difficult. Most of the time you feel like you are barely keeping your head above water, and someone is always trying to hand you a brick! It was no different for me. I wanted to give students an experience like mine in SAE Baja. This meant I needed Haas CNC milling machines and lathes, the tooling to support them, a CAD/CAM [computer-aided design/computer aided-manufacturing] computer lab, inspection equipment, and just about anything else I could think of that would help students prepare for careers in engineering.

The first few years was figuring out how to make this vision a reality. All of this is easily a six-figure expense, but I was adamant that we should teach students on industry-standard equipment, not “educational” tools and modules. The analogy I used was, “We’re not going to make world class chefs by teaching them to cook on Easy-Bake Ovens.”

But again, by fate or random chance, an incredible opportunity arose via a California grant designed to improve, modernize, and enhance career and technical education programs in the state. What I put in the proposal came from my direct experience working on the Baja SAE team, Stover’s many lessons, and the mistakes I learned from. In other words, learn by doing.

The next five years was a program and shop in constant development—hundreds of hours of lesson planning, project development, calibrating equipment, creating fixtures, and making everything as “freshman proof” as possible. If something wasn’t right, all I had to do was recall my experience in Baja SAE and aim at recreating that. As our program and our students grew and matured, we went from a respectable shop to a school within a school, the Titan Engineering & Technology Academy. Every year, we accept 64 students into a four-year program. They’re challenged by taking math and science courses with our school’s best teachers.

While in these classes, students learn SolidWorks CAD design and master CAM/CNC programming. They learn to set up and operate our Haas CNC machines, and they learn inspection techniques that they employ on parts they designed, programmed, and manufactured. Along the way, they earn professional certifications and college credit.

This year, we are working with the current Cal Poly Pomona Baja SAE team to produce parts on our CNC machines for the team. Our seniors are working with current Cal Poly Pomona engineering students to make parts on our Haas milling machines and our Flow CNC water jet.  We are the only high school in the nation that is working with and producing parts for collegiate race teams.

I love running this program because there’s nothing like watching students form into their own little family. The academy is challenging. Some of what they learn here is at a college-level standard, but every student is driven and motivated. Watching them celebrate each other’s successes and encouraging each other when someone fails is something I’ll never get tired of seeing. At the end of each year, we have a big party with the graduating seniors. It’s a night of celebrations and a slideshow with four years of memories and no shortage of tears.

It’s been over 20 years since I inherited this train wreck of a shop which we’ve transformed into a cutting-edge engineering lab.  Every year, our engineering academy hosts get-togethers for graduates and special events. Our alumni visit us at the academy as guest speakers and host student tours of their workplaces.

Turns out I still love to build stuff, but what was missing was who I was building it for. There’s nothing like watching these students work, build stuff, and expand their minds on what their own potential can be. They’re building memories and their future lives, and I have the good fortune to be a part of that.