Students from Texas A&M Engineering’s Space Engineering Institute (SEI) participated in the 25th Annual Career and Education Day sponsored by the Houston Hispanic Forum Feb. 7 at the George Brown Convention Center.

SEI members from the Advanced Antenna Team: Frank Drummond (aerospace engineering, graduate student mentor), Stephen Davis (aerospace engineering sophomore), Rachel Anderson (electrical engineering senior), David Umana (electrical engineering freshman), Cameron Peters (aerospace engineering freshman), Joel Barrera (electrical engineering senior).

This year’s attendance totaled more than 17,000. The annual event is designed to educate students in grades six through 12 and their parents on career choices, college preparation and financial aid. From SEI, 14 students traveled to Houston to give four one hour-long presentations on engineering. Each presentation had three components: an overview of all engineering majors, overview of one SEI team project and a panel discussion. An SEI graduate team mentor Julianna Camacho (graduate student in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering) moderated each session, while the SEI undergraduate students presented their work.

The three SEI team projects presented were: Advanced Antenna, Water Reclamation and Shape Memory Alloy-Based Actuator. In the panel discussion, graduate and undergraduate students joined engineers from Shell Corp. to answer questions from the audience about career choices in engineering. Shell donated door prizes that included two iPods and two rolling backpacks.

SEI students from the Water Reclamation Team: David Moore (civil engineering freshman), Sandhya Ramesh (biomedical engineering freshman), Elizabeth Joachim (biomedical engineering junior) and Julianna Camacho (civil engineering, graduate student mentor); and SMA Actuator Team: Jonathan McClellan (aerospace engineering sophomore), Timothy Guenthner (aerospace engineering senior) and Iris Hill (industrial engineering freshman).

In addition to the four panel sessions, the SEI students represented Texas A&M’s Dwight Look College of Engineering with an exhibition booth. Students handed out brochures and talked to students and parents about engineering and Texas A&M University.

The Space Engineering Institute, part of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), is a program that engages undergraduate engineering students beginning in the freshman year in interdisciplinary and mutli-level team projects that run multiple semesters. Each team is composed of six to eight undergraduates, a graduate student mentor who acts as project manager, a faculty mentor and a NASA or industry sponsor. The program has been focused on NASA and space exploration projects, and due to its recognized success, has since expanded to other areas, including nuclear engineering. The program’s main focus is to enhance the academic education of our undergraduates with valuable engineering experiences through sponsored projects. SEI teams present their technical work at regional and national events and, for the first time, hope to present at the International Conference of Nuclear Engineering in Belgium in the summer of 2009.

The Engineering Student Services and Academic Programs (ESSAP) Office at Texas A&M University for sponsoring SEI’s participation in this event. For more information on the TEES Space Engineering Institute, please visit http://sei.tamu.edu or e-mail Diretor Magda Lagoudas at m-lagoudas@tamu.edu. For more information about the HHF or Career and Education Day, visit http://www.hispanicforum.org.

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