School of Engineering kicks off National Engineers Week celebrations

Yesterday, the School of Engineering began its annual celebration of National Engineers Week (E-Week), which honors the profession and study of engineering.

E-Week, which will continue through Friday, is intended to highlight what engineering means to both engineers and non-engineers and to introduce the field to those who have not yet explored the discipline, according to Chris Swan, the dean of undergraduate education for the School of Engineering.

“It’s a powerful evaluation and acknowledgment of the stuff that engineers do as affirmation to the engineer, but also as a showcase to what engineering is about to those in engineering as well as those outside,” Swan said.

The events scheduled for E-Week this year are designed to attract all audiences, from engineers and liberal arts students to students outside of Tufts, according to its organizers. The celebrations began with a carnival on Monday, which will be followed by a spread of other events, some of which will be more professional in nature and some more casual.

"[It is] really just engineers having a good time. They want to celebrate the show," Swan said. "There's also opportunities ... on the more serious side for engineering students to interact with alumni and potential employers. So there's opportunities to actually find a job, find your direction, find your career."

One of the more amusing of these celebrations is an event on Tuesday titled "Are You Smarter than a Faculty Member?" during which faculty and graduate students will face off to answer trivia questions, according to Jessica Stieglitz, the secretary of the Graduate Student Council.

“There's a faculty team and graduate student teams, and they just try to answer questions from different graduate engineering curriculums in the School of Engineering at Tufts," Stieglitz, a fifth-year graduate student, said. "They're traditionally not good at it. We did it last year for the first time, and it's honestly hilarious to watch faculty members and graduate students try to answer computer science questions when they have no idea what the question even says, not to mention the answer.”

Stieglitz explained that it is important to focus on creating events that include graduate student organizations, such as the Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering Society (BEaChES) and the Graduate Society of Women Engineers, to increase graduate student engagement.

“We were originally contacted to try to improve the graduate student attendance during the live events because a lot of them tend to be developed by undergraduate students, so they're geared towards undergraduates,” Stieglitz said.

Graduate student organizations will also host two other events — a mental health talk on Wednesday and a lunch on Thursday — to celebrate exemplary engineers in their fields at Tufts, according to the schedule of events. 

“Wednesday is a mental health focus, so it's a keynote by Claire Weigand in the Academic Resource Center,” Stieglitz said. “Thursday is going to be Exemplary Engineers, which is just a celebratory lunch that’s with [BEaChES]. The faculty and graduate students voted on Facebook for their favorite person, faculty member or graduate student in the departments. And it's like a mini award ceremony.”

For undergraduates, the "Meet Your Majors: What Does Each Engineering Major Actually Do?" event on Wednesday aims to help first-years explore the various majors offered within the School of Engineering before making a final decision on which to declare.

“There will be representatives from each one of those degree areas to talk about what their degree is about," Swan said. "And that one is also tied into fun. So I know that computer science would put up a video game big screen, and they would have a group of people playing the video game, and other displays happened as well."

In order to attract more interest in engineering from the surrounding community, Swan explained that the School of Engineering will host a prospective student workshop for high school students, while another event will introduce elementary school students to projects in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

“Because it is vacation week in Massachusetts in particular, this is a good time to bring your kids in if you haven't done this yet, and they can interact on STEM projects hands-on and see if they have an interest towards doing engineering,” Swan said. “We also have, on Wednesday, visits to our maker space. And those are actually going to be tied into visits from potential Tufts University applicants."

The E-Week events resemble last year's celebration, except for the absence of a keynote speaker, according to Swan.

“Names are batted around but say if we got an astronaut in here, we are already paying $15,000–$25,000 just to get them here, and we're not capable of pay that funding," Swan said. "There are enough events during the week that this speaker could get lost in that group. As it is a pretty packed schedule."

Stieglitz emphasized that there are many opportunities for non-engineers to get involved in E-Week as well.

“They're meant to be open to everyone," Stieglitz said. "I think the expectation is probably people will assume that if you're not an engineer, it's not really for you, which isn't the case at all. Everyone can learn more about how to improve their mental health, right? ... There's no math tests or anything."

Jianmin Qu, dean of the School of Engineering, added that a goal of E-Week is to attract students from across the Tufts community.

“The events are open to all students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members," Qu wrote in an email to the Daily. "Tufts is a highly interdisciplinary university, and E-week serves as a great opportunity for students to begin collaborations that bridge disciplines.”