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.

Posted by Sarah Brown at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Sarah Brown at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)