Hands-on learning powers high-tech career confidence
Four Buckeyes—a student and three alumni—share how Engineering Tech has built a foundation for their futures.
Amanda Becker works with Ted Hill, a CerCo Corp. water jet operator, to refine a cut on a ceramic brick. The alumna started her college career in a pre-med program, but nothing clicked until she found engineering tech at Ohio State.
Amanda Becker ’18, ’24
Crafting ceramic armor, and her own path
Amanda Becker’s world is precision. Her path there? A bit of a journey.
Today, she’s a drafting and tooling design engineer at CerCo Corp. in Shreve, Ohio, where they manufacture everything from structural components to military-grade ceramic body armor. It’s a role in which precision is key—and that’s where Becker thrives.
But it wasn’t always clear this was where she’d end up. After high school, she enrolled in a pre-med program that required 24-credit-hour semesters. “It didn’t jive,” Becker says with a laugh, this from the daughter of a psychologist and family doctor.
So she pivoted to a first love: building things. She started classes at Ohio State Mansfield, then transferred to Columbus with designs on pursuing materials engineering. But after a year working at a brush factory in Wooster, she returned to Ohio State Mansfield in fall 2020, when the engineering tech program was rolling out.
She enrolled in the program and everything clicked. Becker “fell in love” with the direct, industry-focused curriculum that blended mechanical and electrical engineering along with business principles. “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed,” she says. “This program let me explore and build real skills I could use immediately.”
She especially appreciated the program’s focus on molding professionals who can bridge gaps between operators, engineers and supervisors—pros who speak everyone’s language.
Now at CerCo, she’s doing just that while designing custom parts and the tooling to make them. For instance, she programs a water jet cutter to shape ceramic plates with crazy-tight tolerances—down to thirteen-thousandths of an inch. To help with the work, she’s created advanced, color-coded Excel workbooks that interpret her data and flag out-of-spec materials before they become problems.
“It’s very interesting, engaging work,” she says. “The hands-on learning at Ohio State made all the difference. We weren’t just reading about machines.” They were running them. Becker and her classmates used lathes, built circuits and solved real industry problems.
Internships at Gorman-Rupp and Charter Next Generation built her confidence and gave her the edge for her senior capstone: untangling and streamlining a bottleneck within a company’s operations to make it more effective.
“Our success came from the instructors and organizers of the program,” says Becker, now living in her hometown near Mansfield and close to friends and family. “It’s exactly what is needed for manufacturing to thrive.”
Ethan Montgomery
A future built on engineering and community
Ethan Montgomery grew up in Newark with his eyes on the stars. A fascination with space sparked a love for science and engineering, leading him to study astrophysics at universities in Kentucky. But after a few years, he saw the writing on the wall—limited job prospects and a growing sense that maybe his path pointed elsewhere.
So, he came home.
In 2023, Montgomery joined the first cohort of the engineering technology program at Ohio State Newark. After theory-heavy classes, the program’s practical approach was refreshing.
“One of my favorite classes was our manufacturing class in the machining lab,” says Montgomery, a third-year student. “We read blueprints, learned the manufacturing process, and I fell in love with moving metal. It was a fun time.”
Montgomery appreciates how the program prepares students to walk into a factory and contribute. For example, this fall, Ohio State Newark will feature its own labs and equipment for materials science, machining and robotics courses—all on campus after sharing spaces with local technical schools in the past.
“Automation is one of the more important things in manufacturing today, understanding how to set up machines, optimize layout. I love that. It’s a big puzzle,” Montgomery says. “You might not design the whole system, but you figure out how it works. It’s incredibly interesting.”
He’s also grateful for the program’s strong ties to industry. From freshman year, students connect with professionals through mentoring and facility tours. “Those are incredible experiences because you find out right away if this is something you want to do.”
He adds that the experience broadened his understanding of engineering: “A lot of people have a narrow view of what engineering is, but especially in industry, you’re a catchall. You’re not just sitting at a computer designing all day.”
This summer, Montgomery put that mindset to work as an intern at Dometic in Wooster, where he reprogrammed testing systems. Once the fall semester started, he was back with his close-knit group of classmates, who founded the Engineering Technology Association at Newark, organizing build projects, volunteer events and fun activities.
“We have a wonderful community,” Montgomery says. “We’re always helping each other out and working to improve the program.”
Gage Myers ’25
Turning a hometown degree into a Honda career
Gage Myers has never been in a rush to leave his hometown of Lima, and for good reason. Everything he’s wanted to this point has been within an easy drive of his front porch.
After attending Ohio State Lima, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology, he stepped into his career this summer when he became a manufacturing equipment engineer at Honda’s engine plant in Anna, Ohio—just 40 minutes from where he grew up. “I didn’t want to make any big moves right away,” he says. “Being able to do all four years at Ohio State Lima saved me a lot of money while getting the exact degree I wanted.”
Myers says he not only enjoyed the blend of theory and practical work, but the “jack-of-all-trades” curriculum. “It’s all put together in one package to give you a good foundation for anything you might need to do as a manufacturing engineer,” he says.
Throughout the program, Myers saw how much of that applied to industry settings firsthand. As a freshman, he worked with a professional mentor before completing internships with Loc Performance in St. Marys and Alliance Automation in Van Wert in the years that followed.
For his senior capstone project, Myers and his teammates worked with an engineer at Honda’s East Liberty Auto Plant to mitigate a defect on one of its production lines. Using Lean Six Sigma methods, Myers helped design a prototype solution that could potentially save the plant $50,000 per year. It’s a project another engineering technology team may pick up and advance this coming year.
“It brought home how the processes we had been taught work,” he says. “And it showed us all the issues that come up on a real-world project.”
Now at the Honda Anna Engine Plant, Myers is learning process overview and how to spot and diagnose quality and production issues. His role includes overseeing the troubleshooting of automation equipment on the production lines—monitoring the PLCs (programmable logic controllers) and robotics equipment, for example. “It’s a lot,” he says, “but a great learning experience. I get to build on everything I learned at Ohio State.”
At an Ohio State career fair, Honda managers noticed Jitesh Vidhani had exactly the experience—in robots, sensors, logic controllers—that they needed for a new cybersecurity pilot program.
Jitesh Vidhani ’22, ’24
Protecting manufacturing assets through cybersecurity defense
As factory floors evolve into high-tech hubs of automation and connectivity, cybersecurity experts like Jitesh Vidhani are on the front lines, defending manufacturers from digital threats.
After graduating in December with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology from Ohio State Marion, Vidhani joined a team at the Honda Marysville Auto Plant as an operational technology cybersecurity engineer, helping protect the company’s manufacturing systems from attacks that could bring operations to a halt.
“Anything network-connected is a target,” Vidhani says. “Hackers are going after manufacturing systems to shut down production and cause massive losses.
“It’s a role the engineering technology program definitely prepared me for.”
Vidhani transferred from Columbus to Marion to be closer to home on a smaller campus and found an ideal fit with the new program. From the start, he immersed himself in the courses, working on advanced projects like a smart manufacturing system. As the network engineer on that project, he designed the full network topology, gaining critical experience securing connected devices on the factory floor.
That experience paid off. At an Ohio State career fair, Honda managers noticed his résumé and reached out. They were launching a cybersecurity pilot program focused on operational tech—robotics, PLCs, sensors—all areas Vidhani experienced at Ohio State.
After graduating, he joined Honda’s production engineering business unit and quickly took on a leadership role within one of the team’s business themes—high-level objectives within the company.
“I don’t have a ton of real-world experience yet, but because of the program, they saw the potential in me to take over a theme and execute it,” he says.
It’s been an impressive trajectory for someone who admittedly struggled with college classes as a freshman. But Vidhani says engineering tech’s smaller classes and close professor relationships helped him turn things around—making the Dean’s List his senior year despite peaking with a hefty 18-credit-hour semester.
“It was quite the turnaround,” says Vidhani, now enrolled in a Master’s of Engineering Management program. “I just felt lost until I found this program. It gave me something I can be proud of the rest of my life.”
