Tufts' third annual Engineering Week kicked off Tuesday with a series of activities designed to encourage awareness of engineering in society and to foster camaraderie among the university's various departments in the School of Engineering.
Groups and disciplines within the School of Engineering will sponsor activities, contests and lectures through tomorrow, according to sophomore Ashley Martin, who serves on the Engineering Student Council.
As part of the week's festivities, the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, today will hold a Jeopardy-style quiz competition among teams from the school's disciplines, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering tomorrow will sponsor a relay race.
The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) tomorrow will also present "Date an Engineer," which Martin, who is also an event coordinator for SWE, said will imitate 1950s dating-game shows.
"[There are] four different rounds, and a girl from each grade … sits in the front with three guys behind her, and she can't see them," Martin said. "She asks them engineering-related questions … and she then picks."
The activities this week coincide with the 60th annual national Engineers Week, whose sponsors aim to raise appreciation of engineers' contributions to society and educate young people about the field.
While in the past a Graduate School of Engineering student has been charged with organizing the weeklong event, this year an undergraduate Engineering Week chair, sophomore Kristen Ford, and the newly formed Engineering Student Council also helped to manage the week's activities. This new approach made for a more widely publicized and student-oriented event, according to Engineering Student Council President Maren Frisell, a junior.
"I think that the students have been able to reach out to the student community in more effective ways," Frisell said.
The Engineering Student Council, established last year, brings together representatives from the various pre-professional associations within the School of Engineering, according to Engineering Student Council Treasurer Victoria Sims, a sophomore. Ford strove this year to bring a more unstructured feel to the week compared with previous years.
"Last year, they kept track of how many people from each group came [and] who they were," Ford said. "I wanted to focus a little bit more on the community side. … You come because you want to have fun."
Though the events primarily target engineering students in the School of Engineering, other members of the Tufts community are welcome to attend, Ford said.
"What I'm trying to do this year is get more people who aren't in the engineering school but do have an engineering major," Ford said, citing engineering psychology as one such example.
A competitive twist to the activities encourages friendly rivalries between teams composed of members of the school's six disciplines, according to Frisell.
Each team earns points based on its attendance at the Engineering Week lectures and its success in the competitions. The team whose members accumulate the most points by the end of the week will receive a trophy, Frisell said.
The week's events, according to Ford, are a way for engineering students to relieve stress and explore their interests in the field outside the realm of academics.
"I remember Engineering Week being the best experience I had all year," Ford said of last year's weeklong programming. "[It was] all the fun things that I liked about engineering in high school that really made me want to be an engineer."
Sims agreed that the activities offer a refreshing break from the classroom.
"It's just nice to take time to have fun with other people in your major and the School of Engineering," Sims said. "And a lot of the activities have to do with what you can do with engineering."
Engineering Week also aims to foster engineering pride throughout the school, Associate Dean of Engineering Lewis Edgers said.
"It creates more visibility for engineering in the outside world," Edgers said. "But the other thing it does is create a stronger sense of community within the School of Engineering, across all departments, across all disciplines."
