A Conversation With New Longhorn Maker Studio Director Scott Evans

Why do you think it’s important for Texas Engineering to continue to champion the maker movement on campus?

The maker culture allows people to create a much richer vision of where they can be and what they can do. And with a space like this, in the middle of a world-class engineering school, you can have a huge impact on that personal vision.  To the students and to professors we will be able to say: If you want to make composites, we can make composites. If you want to machine some aluminum parts, we can do that. If you need electronics, we’ve got electronics. We’ve got 3-D printers, we’ve got scanners, we’ve got laser cutters — we’ve got everything!  What you can imagine you can build.

So whether you’re talking about a student who is the first in her family to come to a university, or someone whose entire family has Ph.Ds., you can put them in a position where they start trying to form a much richer vision of the future and where they can go. Once you do that, those visions become potential realities and our maker studio becomes the thing that helps them get there.