Trevor Ruggiero in class

Step inside the computer room at Waldorf High School and you will see students working on four new Acer computers and Dell monitors thanks to the motivation of alumnus Trevor Ruggiero, class of 2004, and the generous donation of Trevor and his father, Board of Trustees co-chair, Gary Ruggiero.

What motivated Trevor to update our computer lab? For one thing, he is coming back to teach a course in CAD (Computer-aided Design) and he realized that our outdated computers would be too slow to use SolidWorks, a program for engineer and industrial design that would be used for the course. Also, he felt that students at WHS need to have access to state-of-the art, updated equipment.

Trevor will graduate from Northeastern University in May with a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in electrical engineering. An important part of Trevor’s program has been his co-ops, where Northeastern students spend alternate semesters in full-time employment in positions related to their academic or career interests. His first was at Boston Scientific, the largest medical device maker in the world. Then, he was at Sperry Product Innovation, a 12-person company that works on product design.

His current co-op is with Fikst (which translates as “well-done” from Danish), a 5-person company, started by Paul and Doug Sabin, which provides other companies product design and engineering services from concept to manufacturing. This has given Trevor wide-range and in-depth experience in the engineering fields as he has worked on several projects, some of which are revolutionary in their field. For instance, he worked on LightLab’s OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) imaging technology for cardiovascular disease diagnosis.

Just what Trevor does after graduation remains to be seen. He has been offered a position at Fikst. He is also applying to The Gordon Engineering Leadership Program at Northeastern University, an intensive, one-year graduate program directed at building a future corps of engineering leadership professionals.

Trevor attributes some of his engineering interest and skills to his Waldorf education. “In addition to the math and science,” he says, “to be a good engineer, you need creativity. You need your own ideas and to know how to apply them in creative ways. The relationship between engineering and art is not so far-fetched. Art is a bridge between an idea and the final product.”

Trevor sees CAD as a practical art. For centuries, architects and engineers have used vellum to make their blue prints. While some still use this method, the new tools are industry standard software packages! The class that he is currently teaching at WHS gives students and experience of what some of the standard jobs of their future may be like.

The nine students in Trevor’s CAD class are learning the fundamentals of using SolidWorks which will provide them with the basic skills needed to begin to design in a 3-D environment.

We are grateful that Trevor has returned to WHS to teach this class, and for his donation of equipment, but he is quick to point out that teaching is, “a great experience for me!” As an engineer, “I need to be understood as an artist and be able to communicate. I am learning more about managing and relating to people in this class.”