FIRST team wins award
Albany High School, in concert with a group of RPI student and faculty volunteers, recently won the 2005 Xerox Creativity Award at the Hartford, Connecticut FIRST Robotics competition. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization founded by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, sponsors regional robotics competitions across the country every year.
High school students, along with engineers, engineering students, and mentors, are given six weeks to build a robot to play a particular game involving several tasks to be performed. The judges at the competition give the Xerox Creativity award based on creative design, use of a component, or a creative or unique strategy of play.
RPI’s involvement in mentoring high school teams in FIRST began at Shenendehowa High School in 1992, and has since expanded to Albany, Colonie, and Hudson High Schools. On March 22, the Albany team came to RPI to celebrate their victory and presented Dean of Engineering Lester Gerhardt with an award in recognition of his support.
Grad schools ranked
When RPI’s various graduate programs were reviewed by the U.S. News & World Report, the School of Engineering and the Lally School of Management and Technology were ranked among the best in the country.
The RPI graduate School of Engineering ranked 34th overall, down one position from last year, and four specific engineering programs were ranked in the top 20. The graduate program at Lally ranked 68 among Schools of Business, an improvement over last year’s ranking of 71. Its technology entrepreneurship program is ranked 21. Additionally, RPI’s Master of Fine Arts multimedia/visual communications program was ranked eighth in the nation.
The U.S. News & World Report guide to “America’s Best Graduate Schools” contains the results and was published last Friday, April 1. In addition to the new rankings, the report reprinted results from 2002, ranking RPI’s Ph.D. program in applied mathematics as 21st in the nation. This report follows two previous rankings RPI has received—having the sixth ranked Entrepreneurial program according to Entrepreneur Magazine and being named “most connected campus” by the Princeton Review.
Honorary degree
Following the announcement of Hillary Rodham Clinton as the 2005 Commencement speaker, RPI recently announced three more honorary degree recipients—Hon. Paul A. Volcker, Robert T. Coonrod, and Joe Juneau ’91.
The honorary degrees will be awarded at the 199th Commencement, which will be held on Harkness Field on May 21.
Volcker was a chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. After serving the U.S. for over 30 years in various capacities, he is now the chairman of a special committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal at the U.N.
Coonrod worked in the Foreign Service for over 25 years and was president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He is currently a senior counselor for a Washington D.C. public relations and government affairs firm.
Juneau was an RPI ice hockey champion who retired after 12 seasons in the NHL with teams including the Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens. He has begun a new career as a partner with Harfan Technologies, an engineering company that develops infrastructure asset management systems.
