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Applause
From Pac-Man to Haute Cuisine
Fairman, Nisbett and Wall
Homecoming Roundup
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And the Top Reason for Doing an Internship is...
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Rocket Man
Beyond the Basics
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Beyond the Basics
Three new programs keep pace with the changing face of "career-oriented" education

Digital Animation and Game Design

Forensic Biology

Allesee Metals and Jewelry Design Program

   Digital Animation and Game Design. Forensic Biology. Jewelry Design. Not exactly readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic. However, Ferris State has developed these new degree programs in response to marketplace and societal needs, which is something that is not new at the University.
   “When I began this work I entertained no thought of making the school other than industrial, commercial and English,” Woodbridge N. Ferris wrote in his autobiography. The school grew, Ferris notes, “out of the demand of our patrons.”
   In the first years of the Ferris Industrial School, when its founder saw the need for a new class, he found a way to meet that need.
   “In order to offer shorthand, I was obliged to master the subject and become the teacher,” Ferris wrote. Today’s instructors come to their subjects with a greater breadth of experience behind them—not that Woodbridge didn’t know his Osgoodby’s shorthand system.
   What these three new programs have in common is the way they combine traditional skills with modern technology, whether that’s a finely tuned aesthetic sense and the ability to create on the computer in the case of both Jewelry Design and Digital Animation and Game Design, or Botany with DNA analysis in the study of Forensic Biology.
   All three of these also are at the forefront of many current cultural trends. Computer-generated characters and environments are now central to both animated and live-action movies, as well as an integral part of training for airplane pilots. New forensic techniques have helped solve decades-old crimes on the one hand, and reversed convictions for those wrongly imprisoned on the other. And design of personal accessories, although centuries old, perhaps more than ever before acts as “shorthand” to define our social selves.
   When Louis Preysz asked for training in Pharmacy, Woodbridge Ferris helped the druggist from Barryton by drilling him on the material he needed to pass the State Board examination. Preysz’ success with taking the exam was the impetus for Ferris to establish a Pharmacy department.
   It’s probably a good thing Woodbridge Ferris didn’t have to cram for knowledge in, say, 3-D computer software so as to train someone in Digital Animation and Game Design. Not that he couldn’t have—especially if he’d had the resources of FSU-Grand Rapids’ Applied Technology Center at his disposal, just like Michelle Kurek has…

-Program profiles by Katie Pearsall