This week, the Engineering Student Council hopes to present engineering’s connection to different areas of study and cultures while allowing students to explore the field and showcase their own innovative talents.
The first annual DVC Engineering Week, or E-Week, began on Oct. 10 and ends Oct. 17; it is open to all students.
ESC president Freddy Kurniawan said engineers often work with architects, artists, marketing departments, environmentalists and people who work in fields not specific to engineering.
“We want students from all of these fields to come and explore engineering with us; to show us how they can help us; how we can be mutually-beneficial to each other,” Kurniawan said.
To demonstrate the interconnectivity of fields, ESC is working with affiliated clubs – the Architecture, Construction and Engineering club, environmental club Green Generation and Future Business Leaders of America – Phi Beta Lambda.
“We would like to dispel some of the stereotypes that engineering students have,” says ESC secretary Mingjie Zhang.
Zhang is a fine arts major, a field that people do not traditionally associate with engineering.
“When people think of engineering students, they think of students who are only into math, computer science, or physics. They don’t consider that engineering is based upon being passionate and creative,” Zhang added.
Passion and creativity are common to both fields. This inclusive nature of the field of engineering is what ESC hopes E-Week can expose to DVC students.
“E-Week also benefits DVC by allowing students with undecided majors to explore and learn about engineering through various activities,” Kurniawan said.
Each E-Week activity is open to all students. Their first event was Monday night’s Keynote speaker, Jeffrey Halim, who transferred from DVC to UC Berkeley and is currently working with a global consulting firm on the Bay Bridge project.
“Life is more than transferring to UC Berkeley… Communicate with friends who are older than you, who are more experienced than you. Think about how you would like to apply your major in a career. Expand your horizons,” Halim said.
The need to communicate was a continual theme in Halim’s speech. “Most of the problems on the jobsite and in the field are related to miscommunication. [For example], civil engineers won’t communicate with electrical engineers.”
DVC’s Engineering Week will expose students of all walks of life to how the field of engineering works with other fields to create solutions to everyday problems.
“Engineering can be easy; everyone can do it. Don’t be turned off by the difficulty of the classes. As long as you have the basic skills of problem-solving, you can do it,” Zhang said.
The Spaghetti Bridge Contest is a playful way of encouraging students of every field to use their creativity and problem solving skills to work together and create an engineering project.
“Most engineers’ ideas are based on a perfect world… and our world is not perfect,” Halim said.
Zhang also explains that the Spaghetti Bridge Contest will, “be a reality check for engineering students,” whose ideas often seem to get lost in translation when they go from being concepts to being applied in the real world.