Six Sigma is an industry standard for process improvements. It is built upon the back of using objective and quantifiable data to identify, formulate, and implement improvements into a corporate structure. Six Sigma is based around the idea of employees performing improvement and leadership projects around their working environment – everything from reducing wasted time and money, to improving procedural and organizational inefficiencies.

Raytheon uses their own tailored version of Six Sigma. Instead of the levels revolving around belt colors, it is broken down into different levels: Specialist, Expert, and Master Expert. The Specialist certification requires an improvement made at the product or area level, and is analogous to the Green Belt in more traditional Six Sigma environments. Expert and Master Expert projects focus on improvements at higher organizational levels.

My particular project improved the safety around one particular product area, and has the potential to save the company up to $200,000 in short and long term disability costs over the course of its lifetime.

The Boy Scouts of America has a tradition of helping young boys find a direction for their lives. This is the purpose of the merit badge program, to help the scouts identify their passions at a young age so that they may begin to foster their interests early. When it comes to the Robotics Merit Badge, the scouts are introduced to the basic concepts of robotic designs with lessons the underlying theories of robotics – like motion, automation, and determining the need and solution for abstract problems. The merit badge is rounded off with an open-ended design project to build and program an autonomous 3+ degree-of-freedom robot using Lego Mindstorms. The scouts must identify the purpose of their robot, the problem it is built to solve, how it solves it, run the design by the merit badge councilor for an ‘engineering evaluation’, build and troubleshoot it, and maintain an engineering notebook of the whole project.

Every year, the Spirit of Adventure Council runs a “Merit Badge University” in partnership with Harvard University, and the Robotics Merit Badge is one of the badges offered to the older scouts. I have been a councilor for this Merit Badge at Merit Badge University since 2015.

Notice to Scouts: to maintain compliance with the BSA’s Youth Protection policies, please do not email me directly without putting the necessary adult leaders and legal guardians in the CC field of the email. Thank you.

Wentworth Internet Radio & Entertainment – WIRE for short – is the student-run internet radio station of Wentworth Institute of Technology. In 2011, we had no studio, no computer, and no server to host our station or website. We were in limbo, thanks to a major renovation of the Wentworth’s campus center. We were unsure if we were ever going to get a new studio or the hardware to run our station – Wentworth did not consider the station a priority, given a less than stellar track record. After much lobbying, we were granted a new studio, and a large enough budget to outfit it with a basic hardware setup. Within a year, we were the sole source of music in the school’s new campus center, and we were continually growing our pool of student DJs. WIRE’s take on college radio is drastically different from other school stations. A lot of school stations still have their FM frequencies, and must conform to the FCC regulations. Being internet-only means we have a lot more freedom in our programming, so they can give their DJs their own show after a short training period. This keeps their content more diverse, and ensures that WIRE uses auto-DJ programming less often than other college stations.
Find out more at: http://wire.wit.edu

Get the Lead Out of Fishing was started as a Boy Scout Eagle project in 2007, and ran through 2010. Initially, the sole project goal was to educate the anglers in Massachusetts about the dangers their lead weights posed to waterfowl and birds of prey – especially Loons, Swans, and Bald Eagles. The project ballooned, and went on to influence policy and receive awards at both the national and international levels. But the pinnacle of the project was achieving what it set out to do, and educate enough anglers that a bill banning the use of lead weights in freshwater fishing in the state of Massachusetts was passed in 2009.
Learn more at: http://www.replacelead.com