Week-long events spotlight the mechanics of the engineering field.
National Engineers Week, which began Feb. 20 and runs through Feb. 26, is a nationwide event that the College of Engineering will begin celebrating this year on Feb. 21 with an E-Week Kick-off Breakfast.
“We just try to make it as event-packed and special for the college as possible,” said Lauren Klausner, the manager for the College of Engineering. “It’s a lot of organizing and trying [to] facilitate different events that the different departments want to have.”
Klausner has been working with a committee of faculty from the different departments within the school to work on planning: mechanical engineering, civil and environmental engineering and electrical and computer engineering.
“It’s really kind of orchestrating everybody’s ideas,” Klausner said.
In addition to the breakfast on Feb. 21, the school held an electrical and computer engineering demonstration on augmented reality, a mechanical engineering demonstration and a civil and environmental engineering demonstration.
The American Society of Civil Engineers planned a bridge-building competition using materials, such as putty, pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks. The Student Professional Engineering Council planned an Academic Tech Bowl.
The rest of the week’s events include a series of demonstrations, guest speakers and engineering-based competitions for all students to participate in.
Klausner said many different student organizations have been working to organize for NEW.
“We’ll have the president from a lot of their organizations come in,” Klausner said.
SPEC, which is made up of the presidents from many of the student organizations within the College of Engineering, has also been involved in event-planning for NEW, Klausner said.
“The members of SPEC are taking this chance to pull together the [engineering] student organizations to spread the word and increase student involvement,” said Karl Lewis, the vice president of SPEC, in an e-mail. “We have started ‘Engineers with Spirit Week,’ a week long contest where students can dress up according to the day’s theme in order to get points for their department.”
“The whole point [of NEW] is to showcase what the school is all about. We have lots of different faculty members doing demonstrations in the lobby, [giving] lab tours, things like that to really show what [NEW does],” Klausner said. “A lot of really interesting things happen in this college that a lot of people don’t even know about. I probably can’t even sit here and tell you everything about them – a lot of research that they do. We’re doing a lot of demonstrations, trying to get what they do really out there.”
Klausner said NEW will showcase the student professional societies and student organizations within the school at a tabling event in the lobby of the College of Engineering on Feb. 23.
“Just to showcase what they do, they stand and represent different aspects [of the school],” Klausner said.
“Engineer’s Week is an event that SPEC looks forward to every year,” Lewis said. “Because it gives us the opportunity to get all students, both in the [College of Engineering] and in the university as a whole, involved in the things that we love to do.”
Valerie Rubinsky can be reached at valerie.rubinsky@temple.edu.
Be the first to comment