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!

Posted by Sarah Brown at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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).

Posted by Sarah Brown at 7:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)