One Fiyah, More Fiyah is the chant for Region 1 of the National Society of Black Engineers, and last weekend was our Fall Regional Conference. Twenty-eight of us from NU went down to the SHeraton in Parsippany New Jersey for the conference this past weekend. There were almost 1000 other NSBE members there from middle school, high school, collegiate members and alumni. Friday after we arrived we checked into the hotel and then went to eat after driving all morning. It was a little hectic with 28 of us in the restaurant, but it was a good time. Then we picked up our badges and went to opening session, where they introduced people, and we represented our 5 zones with chants.

Saturday was the main event of the conference. Gerneral Session begins with a roll call of all of the chapters in attendance. This is the most energetic part of the conference, even at 8am, we are all about representing our schools and zones. The region is broken into 5 zones: New England, Upstate(NY), Metro/LI(NY), New Jersey, and Canada. After General Session, there were workshops, a career fair, poster session, and the Academic Technical Bowl. The last event in the maind part of the day was the Zone meeting, where we strategized ways to make New England the best zone in the region, and where Northeastern won Chapter of the Summer. Dinner was at the Black Tie Banquet, where I won Region 1 Member of the Summer.

Back on campus everyone is finally out of midterms, and back into a more regular schedule, but the semester is close to the end, as is my coop. I'll be home for Christmas in 5 weeks, and then back in classes two weeks after that. I just had course registration this week, which is the ultimate reminder that home-work free life is coming to an end.

Since applications are going to be due soon, I'm sure people must have questions, feel free to ask!

Since my last post, I've been really busy. There was the BESS & IEEE (institute of electrical and electronics engineers) trip to the Museum of Science, and NSBE New England Zone Fall Zone Conference at WPI. Then since last Thursday: meeting the new Gordon-CenSSIS Scholars, Open House in the African American Institute, Women in Engineering day with prospective students, NU Service Day, BESS Corporate Series, TORCH, an intense Student Activities Fee Manual Review meeting, the Gordon CenSSIS Research and Industrial Collaboration Conference (RICC), Ribbon Cutting on the new ALERT Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the opening of a photo essay on a woman's experience with breast cancer where I spoke about my co-op, the BESS meeting about resumes. To top it all off after the meeting this evening BESS all went down to AfterHOURS for Soulful Expressions hosted by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, a live jazz band with spoken word and hip-hop performances and lessons about the history of jazz by prof. Leonard Brown

Obviously this was far too many great things to write about, and all of that would be far too long, but if any of those other things are of interest to you or anything else, just ask.

Last Friday was Women in Engineering Day for prospective students, I sat on the student panel with 9 other female engineering student, from all different years from freshmen to 1st year masters candidate. We answered questions for girls & their parents about engineering, Northeastern, and being one of few females in our classes. After the panel we joined the prospective students and their families for lunch where we were available to answer any additional questions they had for us.

This week Wednesday and Thursday was the Gordon-CenSSIS RICC and celebration of the new ALERT center of Excellence. We saw technical talks and then a poster session on Wednesday. At the poster session since I didn't have a poster, I got to see what work other students in the center are doing. It's so interesting to see all of the different applications of such similar work. The main idea of CenSSIS is diverse problems, similar solutions and the student poster session is one of the most clear examples of exactly how true it is. Wednesday they also had a few speakers from the Department of Homeland Security about how the ALERT center will fit into their plan.
Thursday the Dean of the College of Engineering and the President of the University spoke on the center opening and preceded the Undersecretary of Homeland Security. Then out in the cold, they cut the ribbon on the center. ALERT is a Homeland Security Center of Excellence focusing on Awareness and Localization of Explosives Related Threats, co-lead by NU and URI with many other university and industry partners. Since CenSSIS is in year 9 of 10 years of NSF support, they pursued this grant last year and won, some of the CenSSIS work translates directly, and many faculty and students are related to both.
Because of the ALERT opening, the RICC was full of people from Homeland Security. At lunch, while waiting in line I ended up talking with the Explosives Research Program Manager from Homeland Security about where I was in school and some of my work. He ended up going back and talking about me to other people in the center.

One of my favorite things about Northeastern is the location. We can walk to the Prudential Center easily. When the Red Sox won last year, even though they were away, campus basically emptied right to Fenway to go celebrate. We have two T stops, right on campus, and the Museum of Fine Arts is just steps away from campus. Our campus is seamlessly integrated into the city of Boston, which makes for the perfect opportunity for students to give back to the surrounding communities.

Last week BESS started a new community service program, our TORCH Program. TORCH (Technical OutReach Community Help) is a program from the National Society of Black Engineers, which BESS is a chapter of (http://www.nsbe.neu.edu/about.html - about the 2 names). TORCH is NSBE's solution to the digital divide and the primary national level community service initiative.

Here at Northeastern, BESS has partnered with the Public Internet Center at Madison Park Village, which is right across the street from campus, to offer two computer classes once a week. Every Tuesday we teach basic computer skills to adults, and computer programming to kids.

This week the adult's topic was the Internet. We taught the basic skills necessary to navigate the internet in an interactive format to make sure that each student completely understood. Next week we'll start Office, with Word, then Excel, PowerPoint and one week on Resume Writing.

Here's me explaining how to use the search assistant in Internet Explorer to one of this week's students. The lighting was kinda bad, but the photographer didn't want to distract anyone with the flash so it' pretty blurry.

Here's another one of our members with another student, showing her how to add a website to the favorites list.

We're teaching the kids to program using an environment called Alice(alice.org). It allows them to build 3D worlds and teaches the concept of object oriented design. We're starting with good general programming practices, like planning out your program before beginning. This week they practiced building storyboards and then built their worlds based on what they planned out. This way we can hopefully get the kids interested in programming at a young age and give them the tools they need to understand using standard programming languages without getting caught up in missing semicolons.

So far this has been a great experience. We planned this program from the start. We took the guidelines from NSBE of creating a community technology center and teaching members of the community fundamental computer skills, but beyond that it was all us. We had to chose curriculum, coordinate with the center, customize the curriculum every week, prepare presentations and teach the material. Through honor society & different groups throughout middle school and high school I did a lot of different community service projects, but when you're actually involved from the start, the planning & preparation, through the execution it makes the experience that much more rewarding.

We also came upon some unexpected challenges. Last week as we taught, the students were clarifying the instruction we gave among each other in Spanish. Fortunately, the curriculum we chose, a free one from Microsoft, had all the instructional manuals available in multiple languages, including Spanish. This week we were able to provide them with the handouts in Spanish. Plus as an added bonus now I have a way to refresh the 5 years of Spanish I took, but have gotten a little rusty on since coming to NU.

In the kids room, the kids that showed up and were interested were younger than what we had expected or prepared for, but we just had to adjust last week on the spot and plan in future weeks that we have kids 8-12 years old instead of 13-18 years old. It makes it a bit more challenging for us as we use a text book designed for an introductory college level or high level high school course to prepare, but it's all a part of the learning experience for us.

-- Remember you can always ask questions about anything here! Just post a comment, they'll all go straight to me first so if you'd rather just ask me that's fine too.

The school year is well underway now, campus is settled into a constant bustle from the craziness that move in and welcome week brought. Although I'm on coop, since I'm still active in BESS I've been really busy. We have e-board meetings, study session, and general body meetings and a new community service project starting next week. We were supposed to start the community service project tonight, but due to a logistical problem at our community partner, we're waiting a week.

Since I had a free evening, which was my first in a few weeks and quite likely last in a while, I decided to walk home. I started past the T stop, Charles, MGH and down Charles Street.

Cars driving by got in the way, so you can't see it, but this garage fits a lot more cars than you would expect, by using an elevator to get them to the upper levels instead of ramps. Beacon hill is one of the oldest parts of the city and I expected it to be mostly old brick buildings, and classic architecture, and while there was plenty of that this caught my eye.

I kept walking and although this wasn't the most functional sidewalk, it is semi typical. Plus it had a leaf that had actually changed. That's one of the things I miss most about home. For 18 years, I thought people who drove to go look at foliage were somewhere in between crazy and stupid. Freshman year the first time I went home was in October, I had to drive out to my ski shop through all sorts of back roads in the woods & between apple orchards, and finally appreciated it.

I also spent a little time playing with that picture. It's nice to use someone else's software to just edit pictures, instead of figuring out the math that I need to do to produce the desired effect, like I've done in a lot of my work.

This one didn't require any editing. Just something I saw along the way that I thought looked interesting,. One of the things I've never really done since starting school is explore the city as a full-blown tourist. I did the whole tourist in Boston thing enough times on school field trips. Instead I like to walk around and just appreciate the little things that make this city so great.

This is one of my favorite sights in the city. It's the church at Copley Square reflecting onto the Hancock tower. Then it started raining, so I took the T back to campus. Back here I got one more shot worth sharing from my living room in West Village.

That's looking down between West F, the freshman honors dorm and only freshmen housing on this side of campus, and Behrakis, home to Admissions & Bouve College of Health Sciences. You can pick out a couple Northeastern Buildings, the flag on Centenial Common and Ruggles Station from between the trees. Reflected in the middle is West A North the highrise that i can see out my windows the other way.

Once move in is complete welcome week begins. Campus is full now and the past week had been very busy everywhere. There were activities fairs all over, meet & greets, free entertainment and everything all last week. Now every day there are so many different meetings and programs to go to when I get back from work and there are some that I miss because they happen during the activities periods built into the academic schedule.

Last week on Tuesday was the night in the student center. This is a huge activities fair with lots of free giveaways. The whole first 3 floors were filled with tables set up by student organizations. On the ground floor they had a DJ and carnival games.

Here are some of the BESS e-board members, Kathy, Sharifah, Janae & Earl by our table at the night in the student center. We have 11 members in total so the rest of us were just wandering around and trading off recruiting efforts.

Friday evening was Huskies Gone Wild, a few hours of bands & carnival games and a cookout by RSA. A whole bunch of groups collaborated to put on Huskies Gone Wild every year. The first year was my freshman year and it won for overall program of the year that year. I won a stuffed husky for knowing a bit of NU trivia.

This week on Monday BESS held our first major program of the year, Guaranteed 4.0. We had about 100 people in attendance and everyone liked the program, evident by the long line of people waiting to talk to our speaker, Donna O. Johnson at the end when I was supposed to be be walking her out to her cab.

The real fall move in started Wednesday. Those of us who were on campus for the summer and staying for the fall moved a few weeks ago, gradually, a person here & there pushing a bin around. Since Wednesday though, it has been completely different. There are tents set up everywhere for people to get the moving bins, volunteers in red welcome week T shirts everywhere, Parking and traffic flow are crazy, and lost people everywhere.

Welcome week is starting, so there's a lot more stuff going on everywhere. All week there will be tons of vendors giving away free samples of stuff on Huntington. Monday our radio station, WRBB is having a "Block Party" on one of the quads. This afternoon there were buses to bring people to and from Bed, Bath, and Beyond for people to equip their dorms to be as homey as possible. Classes will start this Wednesday for people in classes, but since I'm in division A, I'm still on coop until December, and I'll start classes again in January.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to comment!

We've reached the final stretch of summer planning so meetings for BESS have been getting longer recently, so I've been pretty busy. In the middle I also spent a weekend in Baltimore to attend the Monster Diversity Leadership Program (DLP) there. This was the most energetic conference I've ever been to.

Saturday Morning it began with a Soul Train Line of all of the corporate sponsors that we (the students) had to walk through to get to registration. Each workshop session to go over the main leadership curriculum they had for us started with some sort of activity, and there was ALWAYS music in between sessions and people just up out of their seats until right when the speaker started, as shown below.

My sponsor was Lockheed Martin, we had a group of about 35 people majoring in sciences, math, or engineering. We split into two smaller groups, for some competitons but we were together for our career pathing & resume & interview workshops. Here's my group (20)!

Our career pathing workshop was an activity where half of us had to fix problems in a code and the other half had to build a catapult. We had to not only do the actual technical design & problem solving but also work in a team and in two separate teams that did very little directly together, but still had to depend on each other. Here's a picture of my catapult team finishing up the testing. I was on the team that had to work with the code.

Sunday was called Scholarship Sunday and from the first session at 8am until the end of the day at 5, every time we were all in one room they called up a couple more sponsors to give away a few scholarships. In the last session, Legg Mason, gave a scholarship to the other Northeastern Student who was there. Then Lockheed went up, and I got one too!
Our coop experience in interacting with employers paid off!

Last week NUPRIME and WIE (NU Programs in Multicultural Engineering and Women in Engineering) along with BESS, SHPE and SWE hosted the Summer Bridge Program. This is hosted each year after one of the freshmen orientations to give a group of women and minorities entering the college a preview of the program academically and an introduction to the support programs available within the college. The new class of "bridge kids" as we call ourselves and the new ones, went out the the Warren Conference Center that Northeastern owns out in Ashland on Tuesday night. Wednesday they went on a site visit with Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems(IDS), who pays for the program, and then Wednesday night BESS, SHPE and SWE hosted a bbq.

After dinner the officers of each organization that made it out there introduced themselves and their organizations, Bridge alumni gave this year's class advice, and Northeastern alumni in the room gave us all advice. We all had one underlying theme in our advice: take advantage of the opportunities presented to you. Many people also reiterated that engineering is hard, but the alumni attested to the fact that it can be done, and there's plenty of reward once you make it through.

That's Bridge Alumni, BESS alumni, current memebers of BESS, SHPE, and SWE and the new class of Bridge students with George Ellis, Director of Supply Chain Management at Raytheon IDS at the end of the BBQ. By popular demand, he retold the story from "my" bridge, two years ago about heart shaped rocks. Bridge was one of my first interactions with the College of Engineering and it is still one that sticks with me most. This year Mr. Ellis taught us some of the life lessons found in golf. My favorite was "Sometimes you gotta slow down to speed up." In golf you have to slow your hips down, for your hands to speed up and hit the ball. In life, especially directed at first year college students, you need to slow down in how many different things on campus you get involved with, so that you can speed up your success. Engineering is not an easy major, at all, and there are a lot of great things to do on campus, but if you take some time freshman year and focus on your work it benefits you later. Even waiting just one semester gives you some time to get a better perspective on how much time your work will really take you and you can also pad your GPA a bit so that those harder classes later don't kill it.

Then Friday I took the day off from my coop job so that I could attend the College of Engineering Leadership Retreat. Each student organization in the College can send up to 5 students and in the morning the bridge kids joins us for team building activities. After a couple of large group activities, we got into the real fun, a low ropes course, high ropes course and then a ground activity with tennis balls.

That's one of the two high ropes activities we had. The other was a balance beam between two trees about 20 feet in the air.

After lunch was the business part of the day. Each group had to give a four minute presentation and then Dean Scranton gave a presentation about running an organization. At the end we had some time to discuss common issues we have and plan for more collaboration.

After the leadership retreat, two of the other representatives from BESS and I hung around for a while with the Bridge students, as their mentors. We shared advice from them, from worst mistakes we've made to all the best things to do on campus, academically and socially. There was a little bit of recruiting for BESS, a reminder of all the resources for freshmen, and the fact that we were still there for dinner didn't hurt(free food is always good).

The rest of the camp went pretty well, all the kids were happy and every night they were excited to tell us night counselors about all the things they did during the day. There were of course the little adjustments that had to be made at the staff meeting before the kids returned Sunday, esp relating to the dining hall. As a student here for two years, the dining hall has absolutely zero thrill value for me left, but to middle school kids it was like an adventure every day. The food isn't bad, I've had worse visiting friends at other schools, but the thrill the kids got from the unlimited portions was just not reciprocated by the staff.

Summer II is in full swing now, so the people on campus have shifted. People in the other division from mine are back from their spring coops and in classes and now that the fall coop term has officially started a lot of my friend the same year as me are back living on campus instead of at home, like they did for their 2 months of vacation. It's great living on campus even when not taking classes because without homework I have more time to just enjoy the fact that we do have a campus, even though we're in the city.

Fall semester is approaching and so it's time to start filling in all the details of the programs we've planned for BESS. This means finalizing room reservations, speakers and corporate sponsorships or BRC proposals to pay for all of the things. The Budget Review Committee (BRC) allows student groups to spend some of the money collected from us in the student activities fee, which is helpful. We have some fundraisers planned but, number one college students aren't a very good target audience to collect money from and two, we try to use those to cover our trip to the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) National Convention in March, which is in Las Vegas, Nevada this year.

Well, this entry sort of grazed over a variety of topics, but if anyone has any questions about NU or especially College of Engineering, please comment, and I can address questions in my next entry.

Sunday afternoon I started my second job for the summer, camp counselor. For the next two weeks Sunday – Thursday nights I’m an overnight counselor for the Bernard Harris Summer Science camp that is hosted on Northeastern’s Campus. The executive directors of the camp are the Director of Women in Engineering, Director of Northeastern University Programs in Multicultural Engineering and the Director of the Center for Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) Education, and we have 48 6th -8th graders living in one of the designated conference housing dorms.

So far it’s been really fun, we met all the kids and their parents during check in at 3:30 on Sunday and then we went to the UniverSoul Circus which was in Columbus lot for the past week. We have plenty of overnight staff so each of us is only responsible for 4 kids who we share an apartment with for the two weeks, which is nice. Today we saw a demonstration by the NU FIRST Robotics Team and then we came back to our apartments for the kids to finish up the drawings of the bridge they have to build over the next two weeks.

After that we had the dorm meeting we had to have about nutrition and then we decorated our door. Last night the counselor across the hall, one of my mentees in various capacities, and her girls decorated their door and told us how it was better than ours, so today we totally beat them. Our door is now covered with pacman, 5 Ms. Pacmans (1 for each of us ), 11 ghosts (1 for each of the other counselors, some fruit and plenty of dots. Once we finished we realized that unfortunately we’re at the end of the hallway and no one else will see our door, or the one who we were trying to “beat” but we like it anyway.

Opportunities like this are great because I get to get some extra money, which is always appreciated as a college student, even while on coop, and I get to work with kids and encourage them to pursue education and careers in STEM fields. It’s nice to have an audience who actually is interested in the explanation of the difference between weight and mass and asks questions about it and figures it out.