Members of MAES Latinos in Science and Engineering explain to interested students about the club’s goals and achievements during Engineering Week of Welcome.
Engineering students were greeted with puppies, sandwiches and candy at Cal State Long Beach’s Engineering Welcome Day Wednesday.
The afternoon event was held on the Outpost Lawn, next to the Vivian Engineering Center.
“Our mission today is to inform students of the different resources they have,” said Teresa Rebolledo, a freshman majoring in civil engineering who was working at the College of Engineering tent.
The College of Engineering hosted the event to give students the opportunity to join clubs and explore the different fields of engineering.
“We don’t want them to just go into our department blindly,” Rebolledo said.
While only a handful of clubs were present at the event, the engineering department has around 50 clubs including the American Society Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and the Astronautics and American Society of Civil Engineers.
Miguel Gonzalez, a senior majoring in electrical engineering, said he hoped the Maker club would be able to recruit art and design majors in order to combine their talents with engineering.
“For example the Maker club, is actually trying to create an arts department and do more abstract design, manufacturing, and 3D printing,” he said.
Nam Nguyen, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering and member of AIAA said he hoped that the students who join the club this year don’t get discouraged and leave.
“Today, I will try to get as many people as we can into our organization because this year we were able to create six different projects and we need as many people as we can,” said Nguyen
One project AIAA is working on is called DBF – “design, build, fly.” It is a project that consists of building an airplane designed for transportation and missions. It was not clear if the design was intended for transportation of people or goods.
AIAA is also planning to launch a rocket it built called “Harambe’s Revenge” in October.
“Right now we try to launch it somewhere in the desert,” said Nguyen. “It’s about a two hour drive towards Big Bear Lake.”
The club encourages students to obtain hands-on experience that simulates real life aerospace engineering that consists of working with NASA, reporting and analyzing the results of their projects.
“When you go out in the real world, this is all about reporting, reporting, analysis, not just building,” said Nguyen.
“We just want to recruit,” said Nguyen. “People don’t like writing stuff. We have to do reports and analysis that say why certain things happened.”
The afternoon was not just an opportunity for engineering majors, but for all students on campus to see the hard work engineers put into the projects displayed for the event.