Posted in Academics

Undergraduates FTW!

The Gordon Institute, home of the Engineering Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership programs at Tufts, hosts a $100K Business Plan Competition each spring. Submissions in the classic business competition and social entrepreneurship competition come from teams that consist of undergraduate students, graduate students, students at partner schools, faculty, staff, and recent alumni. As seen in BostonInno’s coverage of the competition – in a year where the caliber of the contestants blew away the judges, the winning spots were swept by Tufts undergraduates!

"Two households, both alike in dignity…"

As I was walking home from the office yesterday I ran into this poster:

Confession: I’m a bit of a theater buff and Shakespeare fanatic, so you can imagine my excitement to see one of our student-run theater groups, Bare Bodkin, playing around with the Bard. Like most people, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school English class. My history with the star-crossed lovers continued in college when I read it for a class exclusively on Shakespeare taught by one of my favorite professors. [Sidebar: that favorite professor tours the country in the late spring and early summer hosting book clubs for alumni. I’m so excited to see her for the Boston area alumni book club on The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.] Then I saw the famous tragedy at The Globe Theatre in London while studying abroad (it was like Shakespeare in Love in Technicolor). During my senior year in college my advanced acting class was combined with the advanced directing class to perform 2-3 character excerpts of Shakespeare...

Students Commit to Action

Tufts students are the type of individuals that see an issue and are compelled to be part of the solution. Maia Majumder, E12, Kate de Klerk, A12, and David Meyers, A13 recognized the magnitude of cholera outbreaks throughout the world.  Together they founded the Village Zero Project (V0P) that aims to build a cholera tracking system for Bangladesh- a cholera-endemic country- that, according to the V0P website, will “create a disease propagation map in real time, which will show the geospatial proliferation of cholera and expose where outbreaks most commonly originate.” The data generated will allow for more successful implementation of intervention and remediation practices to contain the spread of cholera in the most vulnerable communities. Check out the V0P website to learn more: http://villagezeroproject.org/.

The mission of the V0P perfectly aligns with The Clinton Global Initiate University (CGIU), an organization that engages college and university students in discussions and projects...

Everyone loves a secret...

I often hear some of my friends wonder where the enjoyment comes from in tackling a new STEM topic when it just means more math and crazy symbols (see eigenfunctions for a wild example). To me – there is something uniquely fulfilling about getting the chance to better understand what is happening in the world around me. Things that most people aren’t aware of. It’s like learning a secret!  Like finding out your life-long best friend has had six toes on one foot the whole time and you didn’t even notice it. 

How Engineers Make a World of Difference

The School of Engineering at Tufts is more than a collection of students with engineering majors. It’s a community. Tufts engineers stay active in the community by finding opportunities outside of the classroom to share in their mutual passions. Students often team up and enter competitions in areas that range from game design to problem solving to design challenges. They are a great way to have fun with friends, push the boundaries of what you learn in class, and of course win some prize money! The Tufts National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) chapter recently won an award for their entry into the IEEE Student Video competition on “How Engineers Make a World of Difference.” Participants were asked to provide a personal profile to teach an 11-13 year-old how an engineer can make an impact on the world. This is the entry from Tufts NSBE which won the award for Best Content/Message: