Engineering Week returns next week for its second year at Tufts, bringing with it an expanded repertoire of events and activities to unite the engineering community in friendly competition.
The week will begin with an opening ceremony at 6 p.m. Monday evening, and will feature a number of creative competitions incorporating engineering.
"Some of the more popular [competitions] last year were duct taping a student to a wall using as little duct tape as possible, an egg drop and a Mr. and Mrs. Engineering pageant," Matthew Van Lieshout, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, said. "So they all have an engineering twist to them."
Van Lieshout first brought Engineering Week to Tufts last year after noticing a lack of recognition for the national event within the Tufts community.
"Engineering Week is a national week set aside for the celebration of engineering, both on campus and in high schools and industry, and the way we're celebrating it here at Tufts is by getting all the engineering student organizations together to do competitions against each other," he said.
Organizers hope this year's event will improve upon last year's due to the increased amount of preparation that has gone into the week.
Senior Nicole Slaughter, president of the Tufts chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), hopes that this extra effort will help draw more people to the event.
"This year, we've had months to prepare, so we've actually got a really good schedule down, and we know that we can have people come to all of our events instead of just throwing them out there and hoping that people will show up," she said.
Van Lieshout said that the aim of Engineering Week is to encourage participation among the engineering-related organizations with activities on campus.
Engineering Week also provides the opportunity for different engineering organizations to interact with each other, according to Van Lieshout.
"Part of the opening ceremony is giving each organization an opportunity to present itself to the other organizations, because even within engineering we don't know what all the other people are doing in their majors, or what the other clubs are about," he said.
He based the plans for Engineering Week at Tufts upon his undergraduate experience at the University of Wisconsin, where engineering organizations hosted events in which they and other groups participated.
"Everybody gets points for hosting events and for winning events, and the team with the most points at the end of the week gets the trophy," Van Lieshout said.
Organizers explained that participation in Engineering Week is open to all engineering students, regardless of their organizational affiliation. Non-engineering students are also welcome to attend all of the events of Engineering Week.
"Part of the idea is that we're doing events in different places, not necessarily on the engineering campus, to try and generate interest," Van Lieshout said.
He added that in order to be eligible to win the trophy, however, students must commit to an organization.
This year, organizers have added a new volunteering aspect to the competition in an effort to encourage increased public service.
"The volunteering is really open ended. It's basically how many hours an organization can do during Engineering Week, however they want to interpret that, as long as it's community service," Van Lieshout said.
Another addition to Engineering Week is an ethics panel sponsored by Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honors society.
Student representatives to the Engineering Curriculum Task Force initially proposed the panel, which was not included in the original Engineering Week plans, according to senior Rayna Trietsch, a secretary for Tau Beta Pi.
The panel, which will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 16, will involve a discussion between student panelists and Tufts faculty members about ethics in engineering.
"The questions will be dealing with the ethics of cheating in the engineering classroom and how we can improve the awareness of this cheating and what can be implemented to improve the ethics in the classroom," Trietsch said.
The NSBE is sponsoring a competition asking participants to duct tape a student to a wall using the least amount of duct tape and to form a human pyramid.
The Bio-Medical Engineering Society's (BMES) events this year will include a tinfoil boat relay race and a lecture, according to senior Alex Mitropoulos, president of BMES.
Visiting Assistant Professor Lauren Black will deliver the BMES lecture on his current research. Mitropoulos said it would be a good educational opportunity.
"I think it's good outreach both for BMEs and for other engineering majors to know what's going on," he said.
