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The mission of the Central Carolina Community College (CCCC) Laser and Photonics technology program is “Bringing dreams to light”; to achieve this mission, LASER-TEC and the CCCC SPIE Student Chapter promotes this with outreach actives to help create “photonics” awareness in the CCCC service community. CCCC partners with the LASER-TEC NSF ATE Grant, which funds many of the various activities hosted by the Laser and Photonics Technology program and the CCCC SPIE Student Chapter. Many of these activities include hands-on “photonics” workshops using a LASER-TEC Photonics K-12 Educational Kit. Workshops hosted include: the W.O.W. middle/high school Saturday workshop, the Upward Bound Math and Science four-day summer camp, the High School Photonics Science Fair, recruiting presentations to K-12 classrooms, and K-12 STEM Teacher one-day workshops. In addition, the CCCC SPIE student chapter organizes and hosts events focused on educating it’s student members about the career opportunities in the field of lasers and photonics, as well as events to further create public “photonics” awareness. These events include, Career Interview Skills panel, High School Photonics Science Fair, Electronics lab workshop, and “Tech Like a Girl” workshop. Session attendees of this presentation will learn about the outreach events CCCC has found to be successful to maintain a very active SPIE student chapter, which not only helps organize and conduct “photonics” public outreach events, but also the active SPIE student chapter helps with laser program student retention.
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