Kai Collins, an 18-year-old student in the Pavlis Honors College at Michigan Technological University, joined the SME Bright Minds Student Mentorship Program — part of the SME Education Foundation’s Community of Scholars initiative — because he wanted to develop his networking skills.
Five months into the program, where he’s being mentored by Darnell Billups — senior manager of manufacturing safety and employee experience at a Washington, D.C., Fortune 500 company — Collins says his meetings are “Really, really good. Really relaxed.” In fact, they’re so good that Collins and Billups decided to increase the frequency of their meetings. “We choose to meet monthly instead of bimonthly just so we can have more time to engage with each other,” says Collins.
Interested in manufacturing all his life, Collins graduated from a tech center program, the Engineering Academy, in Traverse City, Michigan. From there, he went on to major in aerospace and mechanical engineering at Michigan Tech.
As a recipient of SME’s E. Wayne Kay scholarship in 2024, Collins opted to join the mentorship program, which connects scholarship awardees with an SME member working in an industry aligned with their interests. At the end of 2024, Collins was matched up with Billups, who was a founding team member of SME’s National Capital Area Chapter in 2023.
Billups joined the SME Bright Minds Student Mentorship Program as a mentor, drawing on his professional experience as a senior manager who’s involved in hiring and recruiting. “One thing we're always challenged with is how to keep people interested in manufacturing — whether it's an 18-year-old coming out of high school or a young career switcher — because typically most people haven't decided their careers until their late 20s or early 30s. There's a whole population out there of people who we want inside our organization.
“And I wanted to figure out ways of connecting with that population. So when the opportunity came up to work with SME and the mentorship, it was helpful for me to connect with someone in that age group.”
As a mentee himself — Billups has been working since 2024 with a mentor from American Corporate Partners, an organization that matches up people transitioning out of the military with business professionals — Billups understands how important it is to connect with people and organizations that can help you with your career and your life.
“All aspects of my life have improved because of this mentorship,” he says about his experience as a mentee.
Discussing his talks with Billups, Collins says, “We go into depth about whatever topics come to our minds, because the whole point is learning and networking. I'm going in with the experience of wanting to learn how to network and how to talk to people at his level of business. From his perspective, he wants to learn about people my age getting into manufacturing. I’m trying to share as many details of differences and culture and understanding and opinions and say, hey, this is how I think.
“The ideas about manufacturing work have shifted in my generation versus previous generations — that sort of stuff. So we're just sharing all of our ideas, and nothing's off the table that we're talking about.”