During a "Manufacturing Day" visit at SUNY POLY, Max Cohen of Meyda Lighting met several engineering students who expressed concern for the lack of a location to build their projects for extracurricular programs and competitions during renovations. SUNY Poly is upgrading the machine shop and labs in Donovan Hall at the Marcy Campus and removed the machines, placing them in storage and leaving club members and other students without a place to work on their application projects, cap stone projects, and club competition projects.
When he learned about the dilemma, Cohen offered them space at Meyda Lighting’s factory and access to its state of the art equipment at no charge to the students and faculty of SUNY POLY.
“SUNY POLY engineering students needed a place where they could work on bridge building and off-road vehicles for their club competitions,” said Max Cohen, director of Hospitality Marketing for Meyda. “We have made space available to the students so they could use our factory for fabrication and assembly, and provided a support staff to teach the students how to work with our new laser cutter and other state of the art equipment. Students come to understand how our company provides a level of components that are unavailable elsewhere."
So now at Meyda’s Yorkville plant civil engineering students from SUNY POLY’s Bridge Builders Club is creating a model bridge that will be measured for deflection, structural integrity and other criteria, when the team faces off against other colleges and universities at an annual competition. Mechanical engineering students are working on the Baja Project, which is a student competition organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in which the students design, fabricate and test an off-road vehicle (“buggy”) capable of withstanding a variety of physical obstacles courses during the SAE Student Chapter Baja four-day event.
“We don’t know what we would have done without Max and Meyda Lighting,” said Walter Zarnoch, a professor, shop facilitator and mentor. "Meyda is one of the major companies that is working hard to keep jobs in the Mohawk Valley and helping to fill good-paying engineering positions and other occupations. We thank Max and Meyda Lighting for investing in SUNY Poly’s students’ future.”