From the time I became the president of the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, employers have told me that our region was desperately short of engineers, and that when they needed interns, they had to travel to Gainesville to find them. It’s exciting to see this week that a major step has been taken to resolve this challenge with the announcement of the University of Florida’s Innovation Station in Sarasota County.

Today I’d like to talk about just one of the many facets in this initiative – the role my college will play in Gator Engineering at SCF. The University of Florida lacks the capacity to admit all the qualified students who apply to its engineering program each year. Students who meet UF’s requirements will be offered the opportunity to attend SCF and participate in the Gator Engineering program. We expect about 10 students in 2017, but hope to see the program grow over time. UF has a similar partnership with Santa Fe College in Gainesville which has demonstrated great success and tripled the number of students in its program in just three years.

These students will enroll on our SCF Venice campus in the fall of 2017 for their first three semesters. Assuming they complete all their requirements satisfactorily, they will move on to the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering in Gainesville for their fourth semester, reverse transfer their credits to be awarded an Associate of Arts degree from SCF, and then continue to work toward their bachelor’s degree at UF.

Our traditional students can participate in the same coursework and upon graduation from SCF could be given consideration for transfer to UF or be fully prepared to transfer to any other state university. This is a great opportunity for us to bring attention to our faculty’s ability to prepare students for university engineering programs.

Internships are another piece to this program. We are blessed in this region with a number of growing technology and manufacturing companies that can provide mentorship and internship opportunities for our students. Those relationships typically lead to full-time employment offers upon graduation, bringing our best and brightest students back home to Manatee and Sarasota Counties.

I want to thank the Sarasota County Economic Development Corporation and UF for recognizing the capabilities of SCF and our outstanding faculty. We are already providing all the classes required for the Gator Engineering program and hope that this develops into a flagship program for our SCF Venice Campus.

Students interested in affordably completing their first two years toward an engineering degree do not need to wait until the fall of 2017 to enroll at SCF—we are ready for you now. 

Dr. Carol Probstfeld is president of State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota.