Reporting from Austin, Texas,
EOS — a leading supplier of industrial 3-D printing technologies for metals and polymers — has launched EOS Affirms, a new student scholarship programme that aims to help minority groups pursue and complete STEM educational programmes.
Through EOS Affirms, the company has distributed scholarship awards to partnering educational institutions while simultaneously establishing endowments for scholarship awards that will benefit students in subsequent years. This funding is meant to provide support for students who may need assistance financially and academically.
EOS says it hopes efforts like EOS Affirms will encourage other organisations, including those in additive manufacturing (AM) to undertake similar measures that will expand the talent pool while also driving greater diversity in the AM field and other advanced manufacturing industries.
Glynn Fletcher, president of EOS North America, said: “We want to help students as much as we can with the resources to lower historical barriers to success and achieve their goals. The path to a larger, more diverse talent pool starts with doing our part to help with educating students in the STEM disciplines and the career opportunities available to them in growing industries such as industrial 3-D printing.
“However, we need to ensure that they have access to the necessary resources to pursue that education first and that is where EOS Affirms does its part. Our ultimate goal is to connect the existing needs of organisations, like EOS North America, with talented students and graduates.”
To date, EOS has contributed scholarship funds through EOS Affirms to higher education institutions and organisations that include: Henry Ford College and Washtenaw Community College in Michigan; the University of Dayton Research Institute in Ohio; Texas State Technical College; and the nationally recognised ‘near-peer coaching organisation’ College Forward.
The EOS Affirms programme represents EOS’s latest investment in its long-term mission to ‘inspire students and to advance AM education’. EOS is rapidly building partnerships and programs that deliver inspiration, awareness, and enablement to future AM creators – from elementary school students to university engineering teams to key decision-makers ‘on the front lines of the additive manufacturing revolution’.