Pursuing Higher Education
in Rapid Prototyping

We often get questions about where to go for formal education in rapid prototyping and related topics. There is no single answer that covers all situations. People have aims ranging from gaining a passing familiarity to pursuing a career dedicated solely to the topic. Often the situation boils down to applying the technology to very specific problems that an individual has in mind.

A "career in RP" is somewhat of any oxymoron. You must decide what that means for you. For some people, it means operating the machinery and/or finishing the parts and objects they produce. For others it means being involved in the development of the technology, materials or software. That's an enormous range right there, and might represent at one end of the spectrum a trade school education, and at the other, an advanced degree in engineering or science. Consider that the general thrust of technology across all fields is to become more pervasive, simpler to operate and more widely dispersed. In the '60's, for example, only high priests of technology fooled with computers. A $300 camcorder today produces better results than any TV studio did in the '50's. So it will be with RP; in the future as prices drop, better materials become available and more accurate machines are developed, we can expect a much higher density of such machines among the general population. The RP jobs that will still be here in, say, ten years will be those that can persist in the face of this inexorable march of technology.

 

You should decide is what kind of RP applications you wish to be involved with and how technical you are. Art can be handled somewhat differently and more easily in some respects than engineering work, for example. Also, the applications will in many ways dictate which of the myriad RP processes you need to use to accomplish the work. Each has its benefits and limitations as you may gather from this site's

The common denominator is grounding in a typical 3D CAD package such as AutoCAD or SolidWorks, etc. You need that no matter what you do. A good and valid approach to this is often self-instruction, but there are lots of courses available. Of course, a prerequisite for understanding CAD, is some knowledge of engineering fundamentals. How much you need depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

If you already have some experience with CAD, and have decided which method of RP you'd like to learn, look for University/Industry collaborations on the University pages. Many of these schools have courses and hands-on workshops for the rapid prototyping methods they have in-house. Their web sites usually have descriptions of the courses or workshops, etc. Consulting organizations also provide courses and guidance in rapid prototyping, but they are more oriented toward providing corporate group instruction.

The rest is gaining day to day experience with the RP method of choice so that you can make the machinery do what you want it to do. It's still as much art as it is science at this stage of technical development. You'll need to find a way to get your hands on the appropriate machinery to excel in practice.

There probably is no one course you can take that will give you experience with a large number of methods of RP, but if you hunt you may find one that covers several popular methods such as SLA, FDM and SLS. While each of the technologies has its peculiarities, gaining experience with one translates into making it easier to understand and adapt to another, just as with any area of technology or science.