about 2 weeks ago, i attended the summer engineering seminar at santa clara university and, to say the least, it was life-changing. i forgot to mention, i infact did take the picture you saw before you opened this.
day 1:
i arrived at the university pretty tired after a long trip from reno (i took the train). after some rest, we had dinner and met our teammates. i was in the aerospace engineering group and got to know my new group over some pretty nice and filling teriyaki dinner. then, we had our first activity, a photo scavenger hunt, which was so much fun. afterwards, we hit up the local 7-eleven for snacks for the week and then went back to the dorms. the dorms were single-person with a shared bathroom for two rooms, but the person i was supposed to share with couldn't make it.
day 2:
we started the day at 7am and went straight to breakfast at 8am. our first session was an intro to engineering by dr. kyrarini. it was super interesting getting introduced to our final project. then, we had a session on mechanical engineering which was really fun and hands-on. my team built a boat powered by the marangoni effect that moved pretty far! after lunch, we had a bioengineering session. as someone who's never taken a biology class in my life, this was actually such a cool session. we learned about a wearable sensor some grad students and seniors were working on to help determine hand movements/exercises. each day we did about three workshops, then had recreation, dinner, and group time.
day 3:
we started the workshops at the sobrato building with a computer science and engineering workshop. it was pretty interesting and we discussed how easy it is for someone to stalk you with publicly available information. we leave so much info online that we don't realize how easy it is for someone to make a profile of us. next was a civil engineering workshop. it wasn't my favorite, but it was still interesting. we got to build a bridge and test its strength. my fave session of the entire seminar was the electrical engineering workshop where we worked with an stm disco board (a faster version of an arduino) to code some led lights and add patterns to them. we then had rec time, but dinner had a twist. i went at 6:30pm, only to find that there was no more food and the chef had gone home. so, i dashed to 7-eleven for a fruit salad before the meetup at 6:55pm. i made it on time! we had a really fun activity before group time, trying to cushion an egg to survive a drop. our team almost made it past all stages, but it cracked on the last level.