february 2009 issue
Student Column
A School Worth Celebrating
From Engg Week to Engineers Without Borders to the Biomedical Engineering Students' Society, it's a fun, interesting and ground-breaking time to be an engineering student at the University of Calgary
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BY JEREMY KOOYMAN |
With the passing of the holiday season, those capable of tuning out the cries of horror brought on by a new semester have been met with a smattering of events and opportunities, both academic and extracurricular in nature.
Helping to ease the post-holiday transition, Engg Week welcomed undergrads back to campus and kicked off with a campus parade of unforgettable magnitude. To the chagrin of almost every non-engineering faculty, this joyous parade featured hundreds of students, some carrying department banners, others marching onwards in costumes.
Ensuring that everyone on campus knew of our presence, a set of bagpipes helped bring the noise and coordinate the march.
By far the most popular event of the week was the legendary Movie Night, which always extends into a midnight barbecue run by engineering alumni and a snow sculpture competition. Students filled a lecture hall to the bursting point to see movies made by each department. It was the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering that took home first place, with its special-effects-laden Matrix: Zooloaded movie.
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SUPER MOMENT |
A bachelor/bachelorette and silent auction proved, among other fundraisers, to be a successful event. One female student dressed as a kangaroo fetched a record-setting $200 bid!
Overall, Engg Week raised close to $2,000 for the Doorway, a local charity for homeless people, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering took home the coveted Engg Week Cup in an eleventh-hour decision that required the judges to deliberate for minutes.
EWB Chapter Keeps Busy
Surpassing the charitable efforts of Engg Week, however, is the Calgary student chapter of Engineers Without Borders. It’s been hard at work furthering philanthropy both locally and overseas.
Like all chapters of EWB, the Schulich students have donated time to school outreach programs covering water (Water for the World), food security (Food for Thought) and energy (Energy Matters).
These programs have been so well received that the students have taken their message beyond Calgary, giving presentations in Canmore and Banff. Meeting with similar enthusiasm there, the U of C chapter hopes to expand its outreach to more of Southern Alberta in the coming months.
The Calgary student EWB chapter is innovative in other ways, too. In fact the group designed a program called Design for Development , or D4D, which became the first instance of EWB content in university curriculum in Canada. Each year students from the chapter work with instructors, right in the classroom, to teach first-year students about the EWB approach to sustainability. They also run a workshop on the root causes of poverty.
“I really think that Design for Development is beneficial for the students because it forces them to think about engineering from an entirely different perspective,” says Natalie Hilbrecht, the chapter’s vice-president of communications. “It can be very challenging but I think it helps give them a more rounded thought process when they approach design, and that is very important.”
Recently, EWB held its first annual World Dinner, a charitable event targeting corporations to help aid the chapter’s overseas efforts. Considered a huge success, the event sold 112 tickets and raised about $5,000, helping send one student overseas this coming summer.
Biomedical Eng Grows
The first of its kind in Canada when it was founded three years ago, the Biomedical Engineering Students’ Society, or BMESS, has experienced rapid growth. This, of course, springs not only from the popularity of the biomedical engineering specialization but also from the enthusiasm of undergraduate students. The current academic year has seen the largest executive council to date come together and execute several successful academic and social events.
Social events have included a meet-and-greet wing night, a dodgeball session, and an ugly Christmas sweater party — highlighted by the dissection of gingerbread men. Plans include more dodgeball, leading up to a grand finale with biomedical engineering students plotting to assert their dominance over students in the energy and environment specialization. This should provide a distraction from schoolwork and lay the framework for a healthy rivalry.
On the more serious side, BMESS recently helped organize a tour of TENET Medical Engineering, a manufacturer of orthopedic positioning equipment and of particular interest to those in mechanical and civil engineering. Having hired students in the past, TENET was a source of valuable information for students in all years of the biomedical specialization, giving insight into career and internship opportunities, as well as the biomedical industry itself.
Earlier, BMESS held an industry night that brought faculty, students and industry representatives together to discuss everything from practicum requirements to iGEM, an international synthetic biology competition that the U of C will compete in this summer and fall.
In cooperation with the U of C’s Centre for Biomedical Research and Education, BMESS supports the Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Speakers Seminar Series. Highlights have included Dr. Naweed Syed, a professor and the head of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, speaking on brain-machine interfacing from neurons to prostheses.
Having attended this incredible lecture, I can attest to the importance of BMESS’s efforts. If seeing a video featuring a monkey controlling a robotic prosthesis through a brain-machine interface isn’t a source of fascination and motivation for aspiring engineering students, I don’t know what is.
Beyond social and academic events, BMESS helps create a unique community within engineering. Students from all departments can collaborate instead of being segregated into department-specific groups that rarely see each other in an academic setting.
I’ve been told that multidisciplinary approaches to problems were what helped catalyze the creation of biomedical engineering. It seems that every attempt should be made to encourage this.
“Personally, I love the atmosphere and the closeness that BMESS brings to the specialization,” says Holly Algra, BMESS’s vice-president of finance. “Biomedical engineering is one of the main reasons I chose the University of Calgary and if, through BMESS, we can convince more people to join this ground-breaking specialization, I think that we will have succeeded.”
All Told
With Engg Week reporting one of the best turnouts in years, EWB deepening its roots in both the community and overseas, and BMESS exposing undergraduates to new and exciting ideas, the current crop of students embody the spirit of school and community involvement — while pushing the boundaries of what an undergraduate degree entails.