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CIRTEC is a contract service provider of engineering services and manufacturing
for the medical device industry. Contract manufacturing is basically
building something for somebody else.
We do a lot of work with start-up companies who don't want to invest
in infrastructure - particularly for building implantable medical devices,
there's a lot of really expensive equipment that you need to build that.
Hermetic welding gloveboxes, for example, can be a quarter million dollars or even a little bit more,
and a lot of startups don't have that kind of money.
There are a number of challenges - one I think is just unpredictability
you are dependent on what the customer
gives you purchase orders for, sometimes what the customer gives you
materials for, and it can be difficult to know
a month from now, six months from now, a year from now, what the customers are
going to be asking of you. Since everything that we do is contract,
you always have to work within the customer's constraints. So that means
understanding that for one customer, the most important thing for them
may be to solve the problem quickly, and that may mean that you
look at a problem and say "okay I'm going to actually try two or three different things at the same time,"
hoping that one of them's going to work and get me there quickly. Another customer may be very
very funding-constrained, in which case you want to find the least expensive way to
solve their problem, even if it takes longer. Yet another customer
may have an an extremely constrictive quality system -
that's particularly true if you work with larger, more established companies - and then
the options that you have on how you tackle the problem may be more constrained
so I think it's a question of understanding not only the technical problem
you're trying to solve, but also the constraints that the customer puts on it.
I think that we look for, on the engineering side, certainly people who are
well-educated, who are smart, who are able to interpret technical information
but I think also what's very important is an ability to
interact with the customer - an ability to really listen to
what a customer is telling you - an ability to clearly communicate, because
frequently we're working with customers who are in remote locations
we have a lot of our communication by email, by teleconferece, by web conference
being able to clearly communicate complex technical information in those formats is very important.
And I think we also look for people who are creative - frequently we get a new device
that we have to figure out how to build
and it's similar to devices we've done before but it's not exactly the same -
so you have to be able to abstract a little bit from what you've done before,
and figure out how you're going to use those skill sets and those resources
to build something that's a little bit new. When we had initially talked about doing
a Problem Based Learning session, we have technicians here who have been through that process
and spoke very highly of what it brought them -
the problem-solving skills that they learned, the confidence that it gave them
I think if we can contribute to that process that's very valuable. For me personally,
I am married to a science educator - I understand the importance of
teaching science, and teaching science in a way
that helps students apply what they learn in the real world
so not just learning something out of a book, but actually learning something
that you could go out and apply on the job - so that was very important to us.
And finally from CIRTEC's perspective, because we need
good quality technical personnel,
anything that we can contribute to science education -
and particularly to local science and engineering education - is valuable to us.