UW Engineering Society

As I have reminded you all before, ESSCO stands for the Engineering Students Society Council of Ontario and it is the provincial engineering student organization that is our official voice in Ontario as well as the organization which provides various services to it’s engineering society members.  Each summer ESSCO hosts it’s annual general meeting and they invite all member schools to bring a delegation of students along with them.  This year AGM is being hosted by Queens and will be taking place in Kingston, Ontario from Thursday June 14^th (you could leave after work) to Sunday June 17^th. 

How-didly-do-folk-a-roos,

As you might be aware, those students not in university recently had March Break off. During this week a really super awesome event was going on at the Conestoga Mall called CANStruction! On March 10^th as the mall closed, engineering and architectural firms in the area got together to build structures out of cans and preserved goods. These structures were on display at the mall from March 11^th to 18^th. Upon dismantling all food was donated to the Region of Waterloo Foodbank. Naturally, UW Engineering got involved!

In true UW Engineering fashion, we got started without a lot of time to spare (we wanted to keep the playing field level, you know).We kicked things off 5 weeks before build night by stealing a room in RCH to pick a theme. Unfortunately themes like “Soup or Bowl”, “Cannon Blowing Away Hunger”, “Merry Go Round” didn’t make the cut (I know they’re awesome, but keep reading!). The theme which triumphed was “Getting the Jump on Hunger” which depicts a giant tuna leaping out of a giant tuna can (see below).

Howdy folks,

This past Wednesday the two of us had the awesome opportunity to go to the CN tower to see it turn purple for National Engineering month! This event was the finale to ESSCO’s Rube Goldberg event that connected eleven engineering schools across Ontario in one glorious Rube Goldberg machine. Signals were sent from school to school climaxing in a live section of the machine built by Conestoga College that triggered the switch to light up the CN tower. The Waterloo machine worked great and we want to say a big thanks to the directors Agnes and Lindsay as well as all the volunteers who helped out with the build.

So as some of you may know, Mike, David, Leah, Matt and I attended CFES(Canadian Federation of Engineering Students)  Congress the first week of January! Everyone has written some blogs on some of the cool stuff we learned there, and it was a very beneficial week! But now, I want to provide you with one of the many things CFES does for you as a paying member of the organization!

This past weekend, a group of students volunteered at the bridge building event at THEMUSEUM.  The event takes place annually to promote engineering concepts to younger children, encouraging them to design, problem solve, and assemble a bridge using K’NEX.

This year, the National Engineering Month directors and the VP-External collaborated with THEMUSEUM staff and a representative from PEO to organize the event.  We were able to get Christie Digital to display their new medical technology, the VeinViewer, at the event.

This past Saturday a group of students travelled to Hamilton to represent UW Engineering at the annual ESSCO hockey tournament hosted by McMaster. These students were:

 Hello Everyone,

We have been very busy on the external front of late and I would like to tell you about one of the things we have recently been able to complete after a few weeks of working on it.  As stated in previous posts we have been planning a few things to promote National Engineering Month and one of those was the Province wide Rube Goldberg machine.  A small group of super awesome volunteers put countless hours into constructing a complicated machine to do a simple task.  

In our case that task was to recieve a signal via cell phone and then send a message to another school via the internet to start their machine.  The video of our creation can be found here:

 http://bit.ly/xMWXe8

Hello Wonderful people, I have a quick update for you all about what has been happening in the world of ESSCO! If you have forgotten, ESSCO is the Engineering Student Societies Council of Ontario and is more or less the Ontario EngSoc of EngSoc’s.  All of the Engineering schools in Ontario are a member and they facilitate conferences, discussion and a representation.

The ESSCO council is made up of all of the VP-External’s of all of the schools and we meet once a month in teleconference form in order to discuss what ESSCO executive have been up to and anything that needed to be discussed.  I (Lisa was there too) attended the February Teleconference on Wednesday February 22 2012 and other then general administrative stuff here is what was discussed.

As you may or may not know, Professional Engineers Ontario is broken up into 36 local chapters which all contain a board of directors and volunteer engineers who try and promote Engineering within their local communities.  Our local chapter is called the Grand River Chapter and services Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambidge and Guelph.

Are you ENTHUSIASTIC and EXCITED about engineering? Would you LOVE to share your experience with others? EXPLORATIONS 2012 is looking for YOU!

WHAT IS EXPLORATIONS?

EXPLORATIONS will be taking place in the evening of Monday March 12. Thousands of Grade 6-8 students and their parents will descend upon Waterloo Engineering to experience the faculty by viewing a mix of displays in a tour of the various departments. The objectives of Explorations are to excite students about engineering in hopes of sparking an interest in continuing their math and science studies throughout high school, to provide the public with an opportunity to see what we do at the University of Waterloo, and to promote the Faculty of Engineering.