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Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

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Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#1

Post by helghardt »

The head master of my primary school took a small group of students every semester on industry site visits.

I believe these site visits played a meaningful role in developing my engineering and entrepreneurial interests/thinking. Although I only vaguely remember the details, I do have a strong lasting impression of the locations/factories we visited and people we met.

I got to see a plastic pipe molding facility, coke cola bottling factory, first wind power turbines in Cape Town area and assembled a door alarm prototype at the neighboring university. This was all before the age of 13.

In university I had similar practical exposure doing an internship at a boiler manufacturing factory, chicken processing plant and finally a tech startup.

I truly cherish these experiences and glimpses into the real world. Obviously I knew very little of what was really going on, but these experiences helped me build a sort-of mental map to unpack my options at the time.

Do you think practical site visits as a teenager is a good idea? Have you had similar exposure and did it have a lasting impact on you too? Do you think we need to create more opportunities like this for students?

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#2

Post by piva00 »

I absolutely loved all of my school's trips to industrial sites.

We went to:

- A Coke bottling facility (when the bottles were still mostly returnable glass ones), it was mesmerising.

- A chocolate and confectionery factory (as you may have guessed, kids were ecstatic about this one).

- A recycling plant processing paper and plastics.

- A nuclear power plant.

All of those between the ages of 10-13 as well, mentioning it now made me realise how vivid those memories are, thanks for helping me to remember them :)

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#3

Post by phreeza »

I went to visit a post office sorting center with my team at Google in Switzerland once. And honestly even as a grown up, it was a great experience, especially since the thing the sorting center was doing was sort of analogous to what some of our (software) pipelines do. Gave me a new appreciation of how powerful and fungible software is. I believe these tours are also offered to school classes.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#4

Post by progbits »

phreeza wrote: post #3

I went to visit a post office sorting center with my team at Google in Switzerland once. And honestly even as a grown up, it was a great experience, especially since the thing the sorting center was doing was sort of analogous to what some of our (software) pipelines do. Gave me a new appreciation of how powerful and fungible software is. I believe these tours are also offered to school classes.

Zurich also does free recycling center and water treatment facility tours. There is also a nuclear power plant tour, but of course they don't let you near the interesting bits in that one.

https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/tours-excursions/from-sewag...

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#6

Post by mtmail »

In school we visited the local newspaper. There was nothing interesting to see because the printing was outsourced. Two dozen people sitting in front of computers (CRT grayscale monitors), conference rooms, some print-outs on the wall. We got featured in the next issue and all I remember is how uninspiring the afternoon was.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#7

Post by ddhhyy »

I have visited wastewater treatment plants in two of the cities I have lived in and I honestly think such a visit should be required for everyone--young and old--who lives in a house or apartment serviced by a municipal sewer. It is eye opening to see what happens to every drop of water you flush or wash down the drain, and especially to see what kinds of things make it into the wastewater stream and to the treatment plant. The tours are often run by folks who actually work (or have worked) at the plant as operators and are quite knowledgeable at all the processes in play.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#8

Post by solardev »

As a college student in the environmental sciences, I toured an awful lot of facilities and parks.

Outdoors, we visited national and state parks, national forests, wastewater treatment ponds, community farms, private hobby farms, ranches, zoos, renewables projects, and more -- from both the visitor's side and also from a behind the scenes perspective, talking to the employees and owners there about how they work.

Indoors, we went to aquariums, landfills and transfer stations, sewage processors, high efficiency refrigerator manufacturing shops, private net-zero energy homes, schools, museums, city councils, public meetings, arboretums, barns, and whatnot.

It was a good swath of the parts of society that touch the environment and outdoor recreation, and profoundly shaped how I view Americana and rural areas in particular. No longer were they globs of indistinguishable wastelands, but filled with interesting (if sparsely populated) peoples and functions that operate largely beneath the radar, unknown to most of the country. That was especially the case after having spent time in the Silicon Valley tech and strip mall bubble.

Most places in my experience would be happy to organize a group tour like that if you just ask nicely (I ran a few). Totally worth it.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#9

Post by javiramos »

I went to a STEM summer camp in Switzerland where they took us to see a variety of industrial sites including the Turbomach generator manufacturing facility, the Gotthard tunnel when it was under construction, an optic fiber connector company, a nuclear power plant, and a few other places that I cannot remember. The visits had a profound impact on me and inspired me, in a large part, to pursue engineering.
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