Hartwick faculty uses his industry expertise to help students soar
Occupational Health and Safety Manager Osamede (Osa) Evbuomwan saw a need at Hartwick. As an individual dedicated to safety, he’s naturally observant and predisposed to find solutions to tough problems. This drive for solutions, a desire to help students, and a unique and valuable occupation led Osa to create OSHA training programs for students that have led to certification in industry standards and quality job opportunities.
“Occupational Health & Safety was something we’d never had on campus,” Osa says of where his idea began. “[Students] didn’t know what they wanted to do — either biology or public health. It was very broad. So I told them to narrow their scope, and told them what I do. There are a ton of jobs, with great starting pay.”
This idea paid off.
Interest in Osa’s programs spiked, and soon he was taking small groups of students off-site to labs, wastewater plants, and local businesses to talk about biosafety, chemical safety, and how to use PPE. Osa also leveraged his own industry connections from his days as a consultant to gain behind the scenes access that allowed students to pose questions to management about inherent risks of the job and how to mitigate it.
But Osa’s involvement in student success at Hartwick goes beyond teaching in and out of the classroom — he’s partnered with students on experiential learning that has led to outstanding job offers.
“I was told about a student in the science department who wasn’t sure what to do after graduation,” he says of a biology major who ended up receiving a job offer from Amazon. “I reached out and offered to help. We worked together for a short time and I did his senior thesis with him on noise sampling and mitigation practices to control the noise.”
And when this student told Amazon about his senior thesis and the results achieved through working with Osa? “He got the job.”
