Hammond seniors Jasmine Bastardo and Molly Musgraves are spending their days building a prosthetic arm.
With the help of a 3D printer, the girls have printed out the various parts of fingers and a palm that they hope to connect together to form the arm and, eventually, help them further their careers in biomedical engineering.
They’ve gotten to do such work through internships at the Hub of Innovation, a group that provides incubation space for local start-ups, and now through a new $30,000 grant announced Tuesday, the center hopes to provide even more internship opportunities, Sue Anderson, program director, said.
The money came from equal donations by AT&T and the Northern Indiana Public Services Company. Along with helping to fund more internships, Anderson said, the hub will also use the money to buy more equipment, such as a 3D printer for food.
During a ceremony Tuesday to announce the donations, city officials praised the effort to help bring more businesses to the city along with helping students further career in the sciences.
Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. told the city about someone who approached him recently, saying he hoped the mayor would bring back the department stores that used to live in the downtown area. Those days are over, however, the mayor said.
“We have to deal with the new reality, and we have to redefine our downtown,” McDermott said.
He argued that the Hub of Innovation is helping to create jobs and companies that will hopefully stay in the downtown area when they evolve out of the center.
Anderson said the hub is home to 14 small businesses right now, and their high school and college interns are working with those businesses and on their own projects, like Bastardo and Musgraves.
Another student, Ismael Nunez, who like Musgrave and Bastardo is a senior at Hammond of Science and Technology, has used his internship to build a drone. He’s also researching the pros and cons of drones. He’s taught himself how to build the drone and then printed parts for it from the hub’s 3D printer.
“I’m loving it so far,” he said.
Bastardo noted that some of her friends who are interning elsewhere just file paperwork. Her internship has allowed her to get hands-on work in the field she wants to work in, she said.
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Kirsten Markusic, a sociology major at Purdue University Calumet, does marketing and website work for the businesses located at the hub. She said that along with getting experience, it’s also been a good opportunity for her to meet people
Rick Kalinski, public affairs manager for NIPSCO, told the audience gathered for the ceremony that the company wanted to focus on helping grow the STEM fields, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“You have a fantastic collaboration,” he said of the hub.
Richard Leverett, director of external affairs for AT&T Indiana, said his company was particularly interested in the fact that the hub provides coworking spaces for the businesses and students who work there.
“Maybe some students here can open their own businesses someday,” he said.