Why a community hackerspace should be an essential part of an engineering student

Browsing the continent's hackerspaces over the years, I've visited quite a few spaces located in college towns. They share a depressing common theme, that of a community hackerspace filled with former students who are now tech professionals, sharing a town with a university intent on owning all things in the tech space and actively sabotaging the things that they don't have. I've seen spaces rendered homeless by university expansion, I've seen universities deliberately aligning their own events to clash with an open hackerspace party and discourage students from joining, and in a In a particularly egregious case, I've even seen a university take legal action against a space because they used the name of the city, as well as the university, in the name of their hackerspace. I won't mince words here; while the former are pointed practices, the latter is truly disgusting behavior.

The above is probably a natural extension of the relationship that many universities have with their cities, which often seems to be one of otherness and exclusion. Yet in the case of hackerspaces, I cannot escape the conclusion that a huge missed opportunity is being missed for universities to connect engineers and other tech-inclined students with their alumni, to enhance their skills in the world real world and provide them with valuable connections to technology. careers.

Yesterday I was at an event hosted by my alma mater, being part of a group of alumni telling them about our careers. At the event, I was speaking alongside a range of people with varying careers who were probably brighter than mine, but one thing that stood out was that it was a rare opportunity for many students to speak to someone outside the college bubble. Yet there was a group of engineers there, many of whom had interesting careers based locally, and in some cases were even actively recruiting. If only there was a place where these two groups could meet and get to know each other informally, a community based on a common interest in technology, perhaps?

It's not like universities haven't tried on the hackerspace front, but I'm sad to say that when they fill a room with cool machines for students, rather they miss the point.In some of the cases I mentioned above, the desire to own all things with their own student-only hacker space was the thing that led to the sabotage of community hackerspaces.As attractive as they are, they are missing an important ingredient, they come from the belief that a hackerspace is about its facilities rather than its community.If you were to look at a piece filled with brand new machinery and comparing it to a similar room containing a finicky Chinese laser cutter and a pair of dented 3D printers, but alongside a group of seasoned engineers in an informal setting, what more could you consider advantageous for an engineering student? That shouldn't be a difficult conclusion to draw.

Universities value their local tech industry, especially one that has a connection to your university. You want your students to connect with your alumni, plug into the local tech scene, and eventually find jobs there. At the same time, you are a university, you see yourself as a thought leader, and you want to own it all. What I mean is that these two positions are largely incompatible when it comes to connecting your engineering students to the engineering community that...