Students experience Pack Expo International 2024 in Chicago

Pach expo is really huge around 60,000 people will get together. So it means all packaging related professionals. They are coming here. So, in class, we are not offering real world machineries, real world problem solving project, but here once students come here, when they talk to real professionals and also they see the machine, then they can catch all different ideas immediately from Pack expo. That's the beauty of PAC expo. We have so many opportunities to take different facility tours and everything. But then getting to come here and interact with people network with people in the industry and talk to them about what their experiences are is so exciting and it adds to our experience, also being able to see when we go into the industry, we can reflect back on specific machines we saw or different opportunities we had within colleagues that were able to then impact what we know at the current time. We wouldn't ever get just big being out one component. So, we really focus on packaging machinery in a lot of our courses and getting them ready for industry, but they can't find more concentration of equipment and suppliers and knowledge than is here this week. So this really brings together everything we've been teaching them. Let them see it in person. We saw something yesterday where they're removing the plastic rings from six packs and just doing glue dot, so there is no packaging. It's just glue. So getting to see like new innovative ideas like that has been really exciting. The greatest thing about Pack Expo is just seeing all the industries and seeing all the companies and just seeing all the different type of packaging innovations and just getting insight from companies and how their processes work. Another aspect of this event is kind of like networking, and even just like practice, like, talking to a bunch of people. So I believe that's a really good skill, no matter what you're doing, and, like, something I carry into the workforce. The biggest thing I'll take back is just how like excited and willing everyone is to, like, help everyone in the industry, everyone that we've walked up to who's been so excited to teach us everything about their product. So, kind of, like, when we go in and we're starting off a new job, and, like, it's our first time, like, being in that environment, knowing that, everybody is so excited and willing to help and wanting to go out of their way to make sure that we can get as much out of every opportunity as we're able to. We wouldn't be able to have students up here without external support, so it's invaluable. We get to deliver that industry experience. Greatly appreciate it because we are students, and we also like to come out here, get to know more companies, get an exterior, like, look towards everybody and be able to connect with even those who will actually fund that up. Having that support, I mean, it's very important to not only us, but just the school in general. External support has really benefited my college career because I've gotten to have a lot of hands on experiences that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten.