This past weekend brought three big conferences to the RPI campus: the Society of Women Engineers Regional Conference, the American Nuclear Society National Conference, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Regional Conference. The SWE conference occurred on Saturday, April 1, and offered a number of different workshops and activities used to assist female student engineers in developing professional careers. The AIChE conference was a two-day event starting on Friday, March 31, and it carried over into the following day.
The SWE conference was held for the Northeastern Region of the organization designated Region F. The purpose of the conference was to “advance the careers of women engineers and nurture any problems or questions that they might have,” described Ashley Phillips ’06 and Nicole Welch ’06, the two collegiate chairs acting alongside the two professional chairs.
They also reported that “the conference was a great success because it had the largest attendance, the most financial backing, and lots of positive feedback,” mentioning also that the event had an attendance of 200 student members and professional members of the organization and a number of different companies that sponsored the event. Next year, the SWE conference is to be held at Northeastern University and is expected to have an even larger turn out than this year.
The workshops at the event centered on helping and motivating the women attendees to prepare for their professional careers. In one of the workshops, Tom Zimmie, an RPI professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, spoke about his week down in New Orleans investigating the cause of the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina last fall. Zimmie said that “there is not a simple answer as to why the levees failed ...” elaborating, “field observations indicated various causes: overtopping of the levees, erosion, failure in foundation soils underlying the levees,
seepage through the soils under the levees causing piping failures, and this is not a complete list.”
The AIChE regional conference was held in the Biotech Center. The conference serves as an “opportunity for undergraduates to interact with professionals,” stated Patrick Heider ’06, the conference chair and a chemical engineering student at RPI. Heider also commented that the conference served as a chance for “undergraduate students to show what they have been doing in their field.”
At the conference, the activities and speakers centered around being a successful chemical engineer in today’s business world. They offered a multitude of events that emphasized and motivated students, including workshops, a career fair for students to interact with companies, and speakers. There also was a student research paper competition and poster competition.
The winner of the student paper competition was RPI student Edward Sellitto ’06, who will go on to the national competition at a later date. The Chem-E-Car competition, the largest event of the conference, featured teams racing cars down a 100-foot course in the Biotech Center, propelled only by various chemical reactions. The cars were judged on the various aspects of design, as well as the success of the car in the race. The winner of this competition was the University of Maine.
The keynote speaker for the event was Peter C. Michaels, an RPI graduate in chemical engineering who is renowned in the pharmaceutical industry. Attending the conference were a number of colleges from around the Northeast. For information on the American Nuclear Society conference, see related story on Page 1, “RPI national nuclear conference.”
