By Jingyi Lin
BU News Service
This article was originally published in the Cambridge Chronicle.
Starting next fall, high school students who don’t have an immediate plan to attend a four-year college will be able to attend a new biomanufacturing program at Cambridge’s Rindge School of Technical Arts (RSTA), part of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.
Contrary to the original biotechnology program, which is research-based and which will continue, the new program will offer students a more direct pathway to employment by experiencing and gaining skills in what local biotech and pharmaceutical firms do, and at the same time preparing them for their post-secondary academic pursuits.
“We really want to try to engage the students initially with hands-on activities and experiments,” Michael Ananis, the executive director of RSTA, said in a recent interview with the Chronicle at his program’s new biotechnology laboratory.
Currently, the school has 12 other job-training programs.
“Every one of them exists because there is a need in the workforce for graduates of these programs,” Ananis said.
A leg up in a booming industry
This new biomanufacturing program will fill the growing demand in the workforce in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston area, according to Ananis, who added that the school is “ahead of the curve” by offering biology and biotechnology education similar to college-level courses, which a lot of high schools don’t offer. School staff believe students have the ability to keep up with the pace of the new program, since students in past courses have been successful.
Joan Abrams, the only teacher in the biotechnology program, spent last semester working at Quincy College. She noted Cambridge students will learn and conduct the foundations of biomanufacturing and large-scale protein production, including cell culture, DNA cloning and protein purification–all major parts of work that goes on in one of the region’s biggest industries. These students will be steps ahead of Quincy College students, she said.
Students who graduate from high school have to complete at least a two-year college program to start their biotechnology career. Quincy College and many other community colleges offer this two-year program.
“It will be a breeze for [our students] because we do everything that [Quincy College] does,” Abrams said at the biotechnology laboratory in RSTA.
She is excited to help students find their passion in biotechnology and help them open new doors to their future that they didn’t think existed before, she added. Many international biotech and pharmaceutical companies have large operations in and around Kendall Square and Alewife in Cambridge, and further afield in communities like Lexington and Waltham.
Students who join the biomanufacturing program will study together with other students in the biotechnology program during first two years. In the third year, the training program will diverge to concentrate on their interests.
The biomanufacturing training laboratory, across the hall from the biotechnology laboratory, is still being set up. This program received money from the city, two local biotech companies and other private donations. The school has used this money to buy new equipment including an incubator, bioreactor and an autoclave.
A student conducts an experiment in a biotechnology class at the Rindge School of Technical Arts in Cambridge on March 7, 2018. Photo by Jingyi Lin/BU News Service.
Key source of good jobs
Keven Vazquez-Li, a senior at CRLS, has been in the biotechnology program for three years. He dreams of being a veterinarian technician or a graphic designer. He thinks the biotechnology program is interesting and useful.
“I personally just think it’s a good step toward getting a job in biotechnology, which is a good job since it pays well and it’s growing,” Vazquez-Li explained.
Biomanufacturing is a “young field” that requires leadership, according to Abrams. When students have all the qualifications to enter the job force, they can earn between $55,000 to $60,000.
“Just two years out of high school, they have the potential to be making more money than parents or teachers,” Abrams said.
The school has 10 students who graduated in 2017 and six students who will be graduating this year. With a new program branch building up, Abrams believes that the next year will be a “pivot year.”
With a second instructor, she hopes to structure the biotechnology program to have 25 to 30 students graduating in 2020.
“It would be very easy for us double [the number of students] and next year we’re already seeing the numbers go really high,” Abrams said.
