NC State’s Rural Works! program places engineering students in summer internships with manufacturers in rural counties. The basic gist is that employers gain talented summer help, while students receive practical experience.
The bigger idea is to help rural counties struggling with population losses show these students engineering opportunities. They might come back after graduation.
North Carolina is a mostly rural state with its prosperous urban areas of Charlotte and Raleigh showing a lot of population growth. Outside of the metros, it is a different story. In this decade, 20 of the state’s 100 counties will lose population, according to projections. Another 10 will grow 1% or less.
There are a bunch of historic reasons. Many small manufacturing plants that used to make textiles, apparel and wood furniture have closed. Foreign competition and automation took a lot of these jobs away.
A lot of kids from rural areas go off to college and don’t come back because of opportunities in the cities. Some research shows that only around a quarter of college students from rural areas returned to their home county after graduation.
A RURAL WORKS! SUCCESS STORY
Rural Works! splits the cost of the internship. Employers pay $15 an hour and NC State’s College of Engineering pays $10. So the student gets $25 an hour. It is run by NC State’s Industry Expansion Solutions, the manufacturing extension arm of the university, in coordination with the Career Development Center and the engineering college. Anna Mangum, an IES regional manager, recruits and works with manufacturers, Career Development and the college to promote the program among students.
Since starting with four students in 2019, the program has placed 600 engineering students in internships. Last summer, 147 students worked at 83 companies, spread across 39 counties.
The program’s budget caps out at 150 students. In mid-January, 103 positions had been posted. “There are 1,852 applicants from our students against those 103 jobs,” says Mangum. She had a client who was slightly overwhelmed because he had 100 applicants of students wanting to gain experience in his machine shop.
Nathan Kiger of Nash County had an internship last summer and is returning this to the same employer, Evans Machinery of Wilson.
Kiger, who grew up on a sweetpotato farm, is a junior majoring in biological and agricultural engineering. He was steering tractors in the field when he was 4, sitting in granddad’s lap. By 13, he was driving the tractor by himself.
He grew up fascinated by agriculture and by all the mechanical stuff on the farm. That was the story of agriculture in the second half of the 20th century, the spread of tractors and other equipment.
Evans is a nearly 50-year-old family business that manufactures and repairs complex tobacco processing and other agricultural equipment commonly found on eastern North Carolina farms. This was a good place for Kiger to intern.
“I used a lot of my classes very quickly,” he says.
Evans put him to work on real projects. We discussed tender trailers, the kind of thing used to haul fertilizer from a distributor to the farm, where the stuff would be dumped into a spreader. There are a lot of hydraulics needed to push out the fertilizer. Kiger had to size the hydraulic lines.
“In fluid mechanics, you don’t exactly learn how to size a hydraulic line,” he says. But he had experienced folks around him at Evans who helped him.
He worked on the redesign of a fertilizer bucket elevator, which is used to move the fertilizer to another stage in processing. He went out to help with installations, and saw the difference between designs on a computer and what equipment looks liked in a customer’s building. Subtle things that he would use to tweak his designs.
Next summer, he will be on the road as the engineering guy on sales calls and going out on more installations. It will be more of a customer-facing role, and he’s looking forward to another summer with Evans.
And Evans is looking forward to another summer, and, they hope, longer with Kiger. “He’s a smart guy,” says Amanda Barnes, president of the company. She’s the daughter of Donald Evans, one of three brothers who founded the business. (Bobby and Tony were the others.) “He’s friendly. He’s knowledgeable, well-mannered, so we really want to try to hang on to him.”
Evans has an innovative culture. Kiger was encouraged to try new designs, new features, not just follow what had been done before. He fits the culture.
“He was willing to get in there,” says Barnes, “and say, ‘Yeah, we got it this way, but, hey, let’s see what it’ll look like if we tried it this way. Move this on this drawing and change it up a little bit.’ Lots of time, that’s what we all need, which is fresh eyes to look
at something.”
THE CARY MAGNET
At the same time the Evans brothers were launching their company in 1979, my wife and I got married in southwest Virginia, where we had both started working after college.
My wife grew up on a Sampson County tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina, and I can remember 40 years ago meeting people on our visits to see her family in Clinton who would tell me their kid had gone off to college and was now living in Cary.
Cary, just west of Raleigh, had grown from 7,700 residents in 1970 to nearly 22,000 in 1980, the result of RTP’s growth and the arrival of the up-and-coming software company SAS, which spun out of NC State. Today, Cary has a population of more than 180,000. Many residents are from other states and countries, but more than a quarter are from North Carolina. Some are Cary natives, but not all.
In the old days, most of the kids from rural counties would come back from college to learn how to run a factory, work in the bank, or, like my father-in-law, to run the family farm. Then Raleigh, Charlotte, Durham and Cary and other cities became powerful draws, pulling a lot of talent out of the rural areas.
There are good ideas to build up the rural talent pool, such as Rural Works! NCEast Alliance has a program to show students career possibilities around them in 29 eastern counties. Also promising are the community college training programs for the expanding biomanufacturing sector in the region. I have written about the expanding aviation and aeronautics sector that has found a hub at the NC Global TransPark in Kinston.
This is a slog, economic development in rural counties. To a large extent, it is a talent recruitment/retention project. Wins are hard-earned, and we need to celebrate them one engineering student at a time. ■
