Year: 2017

Fluor Corporation hosted its 28th annual Golf for Greenville charity golf tournament in May 2017, raising $601,000 for Upstate charities. One of the beneficiaries of this year’s Golf for Greenville tournament was Clemson’s Science on the Move mobile program, which provides education resources designed to increase students’ exposure and interest in STEM. Science on the Move follows students ages 5-19, giving them the skills to further their training after graduation and prepare them for careers in the sciences. This program intends to help coach students to become the prepared workforce that South Carolina needs to interest new businesses and encourage economic growth.

Since the event began in 1990, Fluor has raised over $5 million for local charities. Thank you, Fluor, for being one of the upstate’s and Clemson’s most committed community partners!

Beginning in February 2017, Siemens supported a three-year Creative Inquiry in the College of Business that seeks to determine the best way to mitigate the brain drain that occurs when a generation of experience leaves the workforce. Companies like Siemens are devoting time and resources to determine how they can maintain an informed and knowledgeable employee base during this generational transition.

Siemens is tapping Clemson marketing students to develop best practices for transferring knowledge from those leaving the workforce to those entering it. The Creative Inquiry is led by associate professor Jennifer Siemens and assistant professor Anastasia Thyroff.

“Siemens is getting the perspective of young people about to enter the workforce to look into an issue that companies everywhere are dealing with. Engaging the next-generation workforce to find answers on how to transfer knowledge within an organization makes sense,” Jennifer Siemens said.

Students in Siemens’ and Thyroff’s marketing Creative Inquiry class gathered information on the generational issue and conducted interviews and focus groups during the spring semester. Students on the project, managed through the Watt Family Innovation Center, will present their recommendations to Siemens officials in Atlanta this fall on how institutional knowledge can be transferred to less experienced employees.

For more information on this partnership, visit: http://newsstand.clemson.edu/siemens-looks-to-marketing-millennials-for-brain-drain-answers

Duke Energy continued its support for two Clemson University programs in 2017 with an $85,000 grant. Both Project WISE, which brings middle schools to campus for a one-week STEM summer camp, and PEER/WISE Experience, which gives 50 incoming freshmen a head start on academics and campus life, are aimed at increasing diversity in the pipeline that carries talent from the classroom to the workplace.

About 60 middle school girls attended Project WISE earlier this summer. This year’s program targeted Title I schools in the Pee Dee, a region where Duke Energy is working to have great impact. Girls attended mini-courses in a range of topics from electrical engineering to computer science, taught by Clemson faculty and staff. Ten undergraduate Clemson students lived in residence halls with the Project WISE girls.

The PEER and WISE Experience began its inaugural three-week run on July 9.  It is based on two previous summer “bridge” programs aimed at helping ease students’ transition to college. Students are studying college calculus, physics and chemistry and learning about research, graduate school and success strategies, such as time management.

They live in the residence halls and have a chance to build relationships that can help carry them through college. The program gives students a chance to begin finding their way around Clemson’s 17,000-acre main campus. Students also meet alumni, providing them role models to emulate.

Duke Energy has helped fund this program for the past 20 years, along with Clemson’s Emerging Scholars program and the National Science Foundation’s Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation.

For more information, visit: http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/duke-energy-gives-85000-to-stem-summer-programs.

Clemson’s Wood Utilization + Design Institute (WU+D) has gained two new corporate Founding Partners, The LendLease Corp. and Simpson Strong-Tie. Both companies have invested in the Institute to support the advancement of the wood products building industry.

The Lendlease Corp. and Simpson Strong-Tie each donated $50,000 to help fund the Institute, which brings together foresters, architects, engineers, constructors and building industry stakeholders to design advances in wood-based products through education and training, product research and development, as well as development of technical and design solutions.

Lendlease and Simpson Strong-Tie join an impressive cohort of founding partners for the institute, including Huber Engineered Wood Products; Collum’s Lumber Products LLC; SmartLam; Mac Rhodes, a South Carolina timberland owner; and Weyerhaeuser Co.

The forest industry has an $21 billion impact on the South Carolina economy. More than two thirds of land in South Carolina — 12.9 million acres — is forested. The Clemson University Wood Utilization + Design Institute is strategically positioned to drive the development, demand and utilization of wood products, as well as address industry’s needs for the next generation of talent.

For more information on these corporate partners and WU+D, visit: http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/100000-donated-to-clemsons-wood-utilization-design-institute

In 2017, BMW has continued its support of innovative research and engaging programs at Clemson. Highlighted contributions include:

Men of Color National Summit – BMW was a corporate sponsor for Clemson’s first annual Men of Color National Summit in Greenville, SC April 27-28, 2017. The goal of the Men of Color National Summit is to open up educational and career opportunities for young men of color, most of whom will be first-generation college students who often face an unusually challenging path to higher education. The first annual Summit brought together approximately 2,000 high school and college students, business professionals, educators, government officials and community leaders from around the country, emphasizing the importance of education, best practices, and choices to increase high school and college graduation rates. The Summit also serves as a kick-off to Clemson’s new Tiger Alliance program, a partnership with Greenville County Schools, Anderson District 5, and schools from South Carolina’s I-95 corridor. Through the program, Clemson University will mentor a special cohort of 400 African-American and Hispanic male 9th-11th graders through a revolving, multi-year initiative.

German Language Program – BMW has supported the German Language Program at Clemson since 2002, allowing the program to expand its activities and offerings for students. BMW’s contributions to the program have helped Clemson host an annual conference for German in the professions for the past five years; supported professional development opportunities for students in the German program, including networking events with BMW representatives and other international employers; and provided BMW Senior Lecturer of German Lee Ferrell with support for his outreach efforts to German programs at area high schools.

Call Me MISTER Program – The Call Me MISTER program seeks to increase the pool of available teachers from a broader more diverse background particularly among South Carolina’s lowest performing elementary schools. BMW has supported Call Me MISTER since 2002, playing an important role in helping the program expand to 13 institutions across six states. Since 2004, 100 percent of the more than 150 students that have completed the Call Me MISTER have remained in the education profession in South Carolina.

South Carolina’s Coalition for Math & Science – South Carolina’s Coalition of Math and Science (SCCMS), and related initiatives the Upstate STEM Collaborative and the Lowcountry STEM Collaborative, is an alliance of partnering organizations and initiatives, each reaching the education and business communities in different ways, with a central focus on promoting economic development through improving K-12 education. BMW has supported SCCMS since 2004, helping the organization bring together partners from industry, education, government, and the community to inspire the next generation of STEM leaders.

“Text Analysis and Natural Language Understanding” Project Support – BMW has supported this project, led by Dr. Alex Herzog, Professor of Practice in the School of Computing, which focuses on intelligent mining of customer data for feedback analysis. Herzog and his team will compare different techniques to determine semantic information that will provide BMW with cutting-edge algorithms; explore visualization techniques that will enable researchers and business analysts to draw insights from semantic word embeddings; investigate how existing methods can be adapted to solve problems; and apply these methods to extract knowledge from streaming data, such as Twitter feeds.

Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries (CEDC), an interdisciplinary, student-directed, applied engineering program that integrates civic engagement to improve the quality of life and work in Haiti’s Central Plateau, have received support from major corporations such as Eastman and Fluor. Through donation of time, talents and resources, these companies and CEDC will work together to advance the field of engineering and develop innovative solutions.

CEDC recently held their bi-annual CEDC Summit to share their research and achievements from the most recent semester as they seek to make innovations that will improve the quality of life for residents of Haiti.

South Carolina’s Coalition of Math and Science (SCCMS), and related initiatives the Upstate STEM Collaborative and the Lowcountry STEM Collaborative, is an alliance of partnering organizations and initiatives, each reaching the education and business communities in different ways, with a central focus on promoting economic development through improving K-12 education.

SCCMS, the Upstate STEM Collaborative and the Lowcountry STEM Collaborative have received increased support from a number of major corporations in 2017, including Duke Energy, ScanSource, GE, BMW, Bosch, Michelin, Fluor, Boeing, SCE&G, Lockheed Martin, 3M, and AFL Telecommunications, among others. Funds from these companies help SCCMS promote STEM education and workforce development across the state of South Carolina, and support annual activities such as the iMAGINE Upstate festival, the Charleston STEM festival and the STEM Conference, as well as numerous outreach and networking opportunities throughout the year.

SCCMS brings together partners from industry, education, government, and the community to inspire the next generation of STEM leaders, and Clemson is grateful for strong support for this important initiative from many corporations in the state.

The Dominion Foundation has awarded Clemson University a $5,000 grant to support a new South Carolina 4-H Junior Naturalist program. Through the new program, students aged 9-13 will explore the environment with hands-on, outdoor education about natural resources, forest and aquatic ecology, wildlife biology, geology, botany, entomology, and more. Experiential-learning opportunities offered by the Junior Naturalist program teach young people to describe plants and animals in their habitats, to better understand various influences on the environment and to become young citizen volunteers and future environmental stewards.

The grant from Dominion will allow SC 4-H to pilot this program with 30 students in Richland, Lexington and Newberry counties at sites such as Camp Discovery and Clemson’s Sandhill Research and Education Center.

The Dominion Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Dominion Resources, one of the nation’s largest producers and transporters of energy. Since 2003, Dominion has donated nearly $30 million to a variety of environmental projects across its footprint. In April, Dominion awarded $1.2 million in grants to 107 organizations, including South Carolina 4-H, that are working to improve natural spaces or encourage environmental stewardship.

Thank you, Dominion Foundation, for supporting the next generation of environmental stewards!

Read more about this award >>

Morgan Corp., a  heavy civil contractor whose corporate office is located in Duncan, SC, recently donated a LiDAR scanner to the Engage Dominica program, a student-led program that seeks to examine and improve infrastructure, sanitation, and development initiatives on the Caribbean island of Dominica.

Students used the LiDAR scanner on a spring break trip to Dominica to collect images and point clouds of the proposed project sites. Using this data, students can measure distances between any two points with a degree of accuracy within a few millimeters. The LiDAR scanner helps save the time and effort of taking measurements by hand. And students don’t have to worry about getting back to Clemson and realizing they forgot to take a measurement in Dominica because they can just check the LiDAR image.

Ben Heinz of Morgan Corp., who is a Clemson alumnus, said the LiDAR will help create a new generation of students who are passionate about learning and service.

“All of us at Morgan Corp. are very excited about our partnership with these students and Clemson and providing them with the tools and knowledge they need to continue these great projects. We hope this device helps inspire students to learn more about the skills they will need after graduation while improving lives for the people of Dominica. This is a win-win situation that we are honored to be a part of.”

Thank you, Morgan Corp., for supporting Clemson engineering students!

Read more about this exciting new partnership >>

On Friday, April 7, five of the Mercedes-Benz Vans Scholars joined representatives from the company and from the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences for a reception in Riggs Hall. The MBV Scholars were able to share about their various academic, co-op, and internship experiences and how they have shaped their plans for the future.  The students also provided important insight on how MBV can build a pipeline of talent by increasing its brand awareness on campus and building an internship and co-op program for Clemson students. We look forward to the future of this exciting partnership between Clemson and Mercedes-Benz Vans!

The 2016-2017 Mercedes-Benz Vans Scholars include:

Ashley Carroll, Class of 2017
Major: Industrial Engineering
Hometown: Walhalla, SC

Laura Chopp, Class of 2017
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Hometown: Kirkland, WA

Taylor Gambon, Class of 2017
Major: Industrial Engineering
Hometown: Greenville, SC

Adam Tuiletufuga, Class of 2017
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Hometown: Indian Land, SC

Matthew Agee, Class of 2018
Major: Electrical Engineering
Hometown: Belmont, NC

Jake Flynn, Class of 2018
Major: Industrial Engineering
Hometown: Mooresville, NC