Exrteme Engineering

So if you read my previous post, hopefully you know what HSLC is and that it was this weekend. Well as mentioned on my previous post Extreme Engineering is our main event of the conference. It was a complete success and I think that high school students as well as us enjoyed it very much. The task this year was to create a boat that would be able to carry at least 1500 bbs and to be able to transport this "treasure" for a given distance. The teams well also tested on velocity, presentation, price, and innovation.
So this challenge started on Friday where we (the extreme engineers leaders) picked our teams after interviewing each student for a 1 min period. That night they picked their positions in the teams (President, VP, CEO, or whatever position they came up with) as well as their team's name, boat's name and their first sketch of this boat. On Saturday night they started building taking in consideration the dimensions requirements and the budget limitations. Every material had a price and the cheapest your boat was the most points you would get in that category. They only had a couple of hours to build it and the results were amazing considering the age of these students.
At the end every team was awarded with first place each on different categories. The real winners were the leaders of each groups. Us (the extreme engineering leaders) got together with the judges and told them who was the high school student that showed the strongest leadership characteristics and we award these students with digital cameras.

HSLC

My club SHPE (Socierty of Hispanic Engineers) is hosting next weekend our yearly High School Leadership Conference sponsored by Xerox. In this conference we bring around 40 high school students, usually juniors and seniors, to introduce them to PSU and to engineering. We aimed for Latino students that are interested in engineering, but we don't reject anyone so however is interested in coming can come. Normally it is really hard to get Latin students to come because of the perception that their parents have of college students, and being a Latino myself I know how our parents can be with trusting their kids to others. We do two trips to their high school to try to introduce the conference, ourselves and to show the parents that we are trustful and that their kids would be safe with us for the weekend, but is still not that easy to convince all of them.
On the conference we have one main project, which changes every year, but its basically an engineering project that would last for the entire weekend. Students get divided into groups of 6 students and get to win really good prices. Aside from this project they go to several campus tours including the Beaver Stadium Tour, the FAME lab tour, and the Nuclear Reactor tour. These students stay with different members from our club, but only with the ones that live on campus, since they have to be on campus due to PSU policies. We are getting ready to welcome the students for this year, which should be here on March 27th.

Fall Break

So now that we are on Spring Break I think it is a great time to bring up with this topic. My friends that go to different schools in the US and most of them have a Fall break. Before I thought that it was fine that we don't have one just because we have the thanksgiving week off. But now the more I think about it, the more I realize that it would be so much nicer to have a fall break that that week off, because of the timing.
As we can see Spring Break's timing is perfect; right after midterms when everyone is tired of studying and ready for a break. On the other hand Thanksgiving is a month before Winter break, personally at that time, I just want the semester to be over. And when you come back is like you need to hurry to turn all the final papers/projects.
I think it will be better if we had a fall break right after fall semester midterms and just one or two days off for thanksgiving as every other school!

Reality Shows

Even though the only reality show that I watch is Big Brother, I could say that I am a reality shows fan because you can find me every now and then watching a random episode of any other reality show. But why do we like them so much? How come in 5 year we have so many new reality shows out of nowhere? First I thought that it was easier to relate to them, but it is not completely true since we can relate to regular shows as well. I think it has more to do with the competitions, but are they THAT good?
I remember when I first saw the Bachelor it was fun but nothing amazing, in my opinion. But if you turn on the TV now there are at least 5 different shows with the same idea, Tila Tequila, Double Shot of Love, Rock of Love, and the Bachelorette. They are all the same, some with bisexual characters, some with rock stars but at the end there are all about paring a couple together. I think it is more of a mental thing, since we KNOW it is a reality show, we get more attach to it. Compared to a regular show where you know all the actors, you know their real lives, and even though we love the characters, we know that some day that show is going to end and all the actors will go back to their regular lives.