Feb. 19-25 was a week of activities and seminars aimed at promoting engineering awareness for the Texas A&M Campus, which ended with the Engineer’s’ Week Finale celebration in Rudder Plaza on Friday.
The National Engineers’ Week (E-Week) was founded by the NSPE in 1951 to promote awareness on the importance of a quality education in math, science and technology, as well motivate today’s youth towards the goal of creating a diverse and passionate engineering workforce, according to the E-Week website. The Student Engineers Council were the official organizers of the E-Week, one the biggest engineering events of the year. Over two thousand people attended the week-long celebration, which featured various events including seminars, workshops in C++ and 3D printing and an Engineering Movie Night with the MSC Aggie Cinema.
Co-chairs of the event were Patrick McDermott and Michael McClure, who spent the last year planning for the event, were the hosts of the day.
“The E-Week is a nationally recognized Engineers’ Week, so universities all over the country will organize weeks of events just celebrating engineers,” said Patrick McDermott from the Student Engineers’ Council. “This is the Friday Finale, so all of these booths are represented by an engineering society. Each engineering department has their own society so we invited them to put up their own events.”
Attendees of the Friday Finale went from booth to booth, trying their hand at ‘striking oil’ with the Petroleum Engineering Department, or building a mini circuit at the IEEE booth. Students who completed three games were eligible to put their name into a raffle for a chance at winning a grand prize. Winners were then announced every half-hour throughout the event. There was also free refreshments available for guests.
Events such as E-Week receive huge amounts of exposure among students on campus, according to mechanical engineering senior Patrick McDermott said.
“We gave out free coffee and donuts on Monday, and they were so excited,” McDermott said. “When you give out free food, they associate it with the people who gives it to them, so they go to E-Week and that makes us happy.”
Fellow co-chair Michael McClure said that it also helps with communication between other departments at A&M.
“This is a good event where we get to interact with other societies throughout the college.” he said, “We get to work with them to put on an event with a common goal, so that definitely helps our relationships.”
The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers was one of the engineering organizations in attendance, and executive officer Jesus McKinnon said that the event was a lot of fun.
“Today is the grand finale so we wanted to mix things up,” McKinnon said. “We like coming to these events because it gives a chance for the members to do stuff like this.”
E-Week co-chairs hope to push the event toward being a more joint effort between all engineering societies, in addition to the Student Engineers’ Council.
“In the future, we want to make this more of a joint collaborative celebration.” said mechanical engineering senior Patrick McDermott.
