City Tech ADGA faculty members Roy Nelson (left) and Steve Caputo (dark suit) with students Vanessa Kwan, Juan Moreno, Taka Nishimura, Darren Fuller, Ruben Borges, and Diana Sanchez at their new POLAR 115 X cutter. Though it’s often taken for granted, paper cutting is a crucial step in the successful production of nearly every printed job. To teach this essential skill, schools with graphics programs need up-to-date cutting equipment—such as the POLAR 115 X cutter that New York City College of Technology (City Tech) recently purchased from Heidelberg. The high-speed, programmable 45" cutter is at work in City Tech’s Department of Advertising Design and Graphic Arts (ADGA), where it will be a learning platform for students pursuing two- and four-year degrees in graphic arts and production management. The new cutter, says Lloyd Carr, director of graphic arts studies, “replaces a mid-20th century, analog POLAR cutter with a more precise, programmable, managed workflow, and safer, more productive functionality. ADGA is hopeful that the new cutter's features and benefits will continue to be efficiently and effectively valuable through the next few decades.” Carr says that Heidelberg helped by waiving a fee for the removal of the old cutter (a model from 1962) and by training four faculty members in the use of the POLAR 115 X. Heidelberg is the exclusive distributor of POLAR cutting, diecutting, and label making systems in the U.S. “Ongoing curriculum development raised an urgent awareness of the need to include networkable bindery equipment to help educate graphic design and production students,” says Carr, whose department serves about 1,100 students. “Graphic communication design and graphic arts production management objectives can now make direct connections to timely, functional industry needs using this new equipment.” Located in downtown Brooklyn, City Tech is a division of the City University of New York (CUNY). It is the largest four-year public college of technology in the northeastern U.S.