My Skills as a Mechanical Designer

There was one last opportunity for Hampshire College to redeem itself. In the years that I had studied and worked after being thrown out of Hampshire, I had become a skilled machinist, a certified welder, and a mechanical designer. I never could get paid much living in the economically depressed Western Massachusetts, but I had worked for several companies and eventually received several US patents for my designs.

Applying to Work at Hampshire

With my skills as a mechanical designer, I applied to a position as an instructor at the Lemelson Center, Hampshire College’s mechanical design program. I had been to fairs showcasing the Lemelson students’ work, and to this day I continue to help one of Hampshire’s Lemelson graduates refine and market his designs.

Learning the Skills for the Lemelson Program

I asked at the Lemelson program what skills they needed me to have to work there, and they told me that the design tool they needed help to train students in was called Velum. I purchased a several thousand dollar license for my own personal copy of the program and I spent several months learning how to use it thoroughly. But, by the time that I got back to Hampshire College with my skills, they had moved from using Velum to using Solidworks, for which they didn’t need my help.

Lemelson is an Expensive Waste of Student Time

When I went back later to talk with the teachers at the Lemelson program, I asked them how they helped students progress to patenting their designs and bringing them to manufacture. In the words of the head technical trainer there, “What we do is just chase the students around. We don’t teach them how to patent or market their designs.” I was shocked that he was so clear that all that he was doing was wasting some very expensive student time.

Lacking Star Power

At that point I asked about possibly teaching in that program so that I could train students in the patenting and marketing process. I was told that my application would not be seriously considered because I lacked a portfolio of successfully marketed products that I had designed.

Perverse Rational

It occurred to me that I would have had this portfolio of successfully marketed designs had Hampshire not delayed my graduation from 1987 to 1997, allowing me to work in industry instead of just working to get my degree.

Progress in my Industry

In the years since I applied at the Lemelson Center, two of my designs have been successfully marketed, and one of my designs has become an industry standard solution, now being licensed to and copied by many manufacturers.

Professional Time Wasters Needed

It also seems that there is a contradiction in requiring instructors at the Lemelson Program to have a portfolio of marketed inventions when neither invention nor marketing is taught there.