Review: The “Engineering a Better World” conference

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Review: Ant here, sitting in the event right now, doing some live blogging.
First Speaker – Dr. Adam Fontecchio
11:10am – Looks like an interesting talk, aparently this talk is about technology in engineering.
11:19 – Presented a slide showing how american’s decline in math and science as they age, where international students (k-12) increase in math and science.
11:22 – They’ve developed lesson and unit plans. It involves building things with k’nex.
11:25 – Lol, he put white text on a yellow slice of a pie chart. More importantly, turns out the ratio of m’n’m’s color is not even distributed, it’s based on cost of the pigments, shattering!
11:26 – Grassroots efforts; EPICS (epics.ecn.purdue.edu)
11:32 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPNQGmCMv1E

Second Speaker – Orlando Gutierrez
11:40 – Orlando is an older individual, “the old guy with an accent” as he put it. And awww, he isn’t familiar with ppt, but they let him make one.
11:42 – As a speaker, the man is knowledgeable, however for this is reading from the slides, a no-no in my book.
11:45 – “Everything we have created has been developed by engineers,” said Orlando, not wavering from his stance that the slide rule is the only mathematical tool a man needs.
11:47 – Wow…the number of BS engineering degrees hasn’t changed more than 10,000 since ’91… amazing.
11:48 – Lol, he said “let’s see what happened in sex”. Females in engineering has stayed at like 15% since ’91.
11:54 – How do we increase female participation in engineering? It’s a combo of how they’re brought up (which is horse *$#^ if you ask me). How do we fix this? He cited NCLB as a success… I now disagree with all of his points, NCLB is the worst thing that happened to this country. Old men will be old men I guess.
11:58 – How do we spread engineering as engineering students? Lead by example guys. I (him) am an old man, you guys don’t wanna listen to me, so you have to go talk to them, you have to be the ones to get your message across.
11:59 – Talk still on-going, no food yet.
12:00 – Cited the statistic that 50% of freshmen and sophomores drop out of engineering, 97% of juniors go on to graduate. We all can fix this, help your younger brethren.
12:01 – Talk over. Conclusion: “I think that enigneering is the salvation of the world… we are not going at engineering the way we should, but we can solve this problem.”

FOOD REVIEW!!!!!!
Om Nom Nom

Food location: 1st floor
Mmmmmm turkey sandwich. Nice sodexho food.

There were also free cookies and pretzels out front of MacCalister <3

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