How ACE Composites training shapes student lives

Oct. 9, 2025 – When was the last time one or more of your friends suggested trying something new hundreds of miles away?

Ricky Conde Salinas, a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, was in that situation earlier this year.

Two of his friends took an America’s Cutting Edge course as part of a class. Not long after completing it, they heard about a new ACE bootcamp offering – over 1,000 miles from their home in Texas.

“I was really hesitant about it,” he said. “But the friend group motivated me to do it.”

Flights were booked, and the group made their way to Winona, Minn., for the first ACE Composites bootcamp at Winona State University (WSU) in June. Winona held two other bootcamps in July and August.

WSU was announced as the first ACE Composites hub earlier this year. The bootcamp they run focuses on Composites in Automotive, one of five composites courses ACE offers.

In the bootcamp, participants receive lectures and hands-on training involving composite products and processes in the automotive sector, such as resin mixing, injection molding, compression molding, and more.

Ricky is interested in a career involving computer-aided design. Near the end of the weeklong training, he said his eyes had been opened to how the things around him are made.

“There’s a lot more to processes than just drawing something and saying, ‘alright, let’s produce this,’” he added.

Regional interest from high school students

Not everyone who went to one of the three summer bootcamps took a flight to get there.

High school senior Henry Williams drove less than an hour from Rochester, Minn., to participate in August.

Some of his family members have gone down the pathway of higher education, which Henry says seems attractive to him. He also has an interest in labs and machines – making the bootcamp a great opportunity for more career exploration.

“I like the making aspect of it,” he said. “The experience of working on a college campus is cool. This helps me see what I would be doing if I came here.”

Henry sees himself going down the engineering path but says there’s more of an interest in composites now because of the training.

Similarly, Alex Shefchik, another high school student from northern Minnesota, currently sees himself in a mechanical engineering career. The allure of working with his hands was the selling point of the training.

“Composites are something I don’t know much about,” he said. “But the hands-on aspect to the training was something I wanted to see for myself.”

Alex is a maker. He likes to know how things work and why they work the way they do.

Growing up, he would tinker in his dad’s woodworking shop. In recent times, he’s taken up making electric guitars.

“The first one I ever played was the one I made with my dad,” he said.

Of all the activities involved with the bootcamp, Alex’s favorite was doing a hand-layup with carbon fiber.

It was eye-opening for him to experience the process of putting the resin down layer by layer to make a carbon fiber panel, saying he didn’t realize how much work went into the process.

And it inspired another idea in him, too.

“It makes me want to make a carbon fiber guitar with a filler in the middle.”

Ph.D. student gains composites knowledge

Abd Adan is a graduate student who works in the Composite Vehicle Research Center (CVRC) at Michigan State University.

He does composite manufacturing at CVRC, which involves vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding, hand-layups, tensile testing and simulations.

His first encounter with ACE was last year when he did the legacy Composites and Finishing course, which was restructured this year as the program rolled out new composites courses.

Not long after completing the course, Abd attended a Society of Plastic Engineers conference, where he met IACMI – The Composites Institute CEO Chad Duty. IACMI manages the ACE program.

“He mentioned that ACE helps with workforce,” Abd said. “He encouraged me to attend a bootcamp in addition to the online course.”

Abd wasn’t afraid to jump right into the bootcamp’s activities. He spent plenty of time in the June training with instructors asking questions about processes he hadn’t done before.

“I learned about injection molding,” he said. “That’s something I didn’t have any experience with. I see how in the automotive industry it can be used to make lots of parts quickly.”

Bringing composites knowledge home

Ricky, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley student, is part of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. His role is outreach to local high schools.

It’s his belief that the knowledge he gained from his experience can be a benefit to those in his community.

“It’s very intimidating in our culture to get a degree. It’s not a priority,” he said. “Out of high school you start working. It would be nice to show them that this stuff is something they can understand.”

He adds that examples of composites would be easy to point out, and that connecting the dots between them and the knowledge from the training isn’t difficult.

“They’re only one step away from changing their families for generations to come,” he added.

Register for an online ACE composites course by clicking here.