06-25-2023 Carroll Living - Flipbook - Page 12
ing experiences in a collaborative
environment for individuals to
achieve professional, educational
and personal goals.
Jon Jopse, who has served as
an experience design specialist at Exploration Commons for
three years, said the space offers
programs and services for a range
of ages.
“Our goal is to provide access
to technology and the knowledge to utilize that technology,”
he said. “That could be somebody who’s in middle school or
high school who’s interested in
STEM or a career in programming, industrial machining or
robotics, or it could be somebody
who’s retired who’s looking to
keep their skills fresh and learn
something new.”
Aside from the resources
at Exploration Commons, the
county is host to a bounty of
resources for residents to learn
skills such as coding, cybersecurity, game development, robotics
and more.
Mid-Atlantic Gigabit
Innovation Collaboratory
Irene Shijo, 17, of Westminster,
was looking for opportunities to
prepare her for a career in STEM,
and found some amazing ones in
her own backyard at the Mid-Atlantic Gigabit Innovation Collaboratory, or MAGIC.
The Westminster-based
nonprofit has helped the high
school student prepare for
her future career in computer
science via an internship and
programs focused on coding and
robotics, which she has been
involved in since January.
Shijo says the skills she learned
at MAGIC will be put to use this
fall when she enters the University of Maryland, Baltimore
County as a freshman studying
computer science.
“MAGIC helps connect
students to job opportunities and
helps develop their career skills,”
she said. “Without internships
and without the collaboration of
these companies, a lot of students
are missing those opportunities
and are going into college not as
prepared as they would be with
opportunities such as [MAGIC].”
Established in 2016 by the
Common Council of Westminster, MAGIC creates a space for
entrepreneurship and technology innovation to thrive.
MAGIC focuses on cultivating
12 | 2023 CARROLL LIVING
innovation, education and incubation with the mission of building a tech ecosystem that creates
and nurtures talent, entrepreneurship and tech businesses,
according to its website. The
nonprofit provides programs
and resources for high school and
college students as well as workforce development training for
adults in the tech sector.
Graham Dodge, who has
served as executive director of
MAGIC for four years, said its
programs and projects are geared
toward exposing students to
technologies at the beginner level
and providing them with skills
they can develop in the future.
“Our sweet spot is to teach
technologies where there are job
opportunities and to put a spotlight on that career path for our
students,” he said.
One of the unique projects that
MAGIC is developing, Dodge
said, is the Autonomous Corridor project, to help solve current
public transportation issues and
usher the community into the
future using vehicles for public
transit that are capable of sensing
their environments and operating without human involvement.
As part of the project, a MAGIC
student intern conducted a
survey of residents that showed
a disconnect between current
public transportation options
and the needs of county residents, such as access to work,
services and social resources.
The project aims to resolve issues
with transportation and parking
infrastructure gaps in Westminster that limit connectivity.
“For the Autonomous Corridor
project we are building a digital
twin of the City of Westminster
that will allow other companies
to deploy autonomous robotics
technologies, whether it’s delivery bots or autonomous shuttle systems, all leveraging the
connectivity that we have in our
infrastructure,” Dodge said.
As part of the project both
McDaniel College and Carroll
Community College have
committed to developing workforce training, undergraduate and graduate programs for
careers that the technology will
create. MAGIC intends to collaborate with the colleges in the
Stewards for Autonomous Vehicles Internship program, which
it envisions as a highly competitive, paid internship for students