Posted by Erik Justen at 03/01/2001 1:16 PM EST
Engineer on team #677, A few screws loose, from Columbus School for Girls and The Ohio State University/Norhtrop Grumman/AEP.
In Reply to: Re: i disagree....try this...
Posted by Matt Leese on 02/24/2001 10:36 PM EST:
We've more or less had similar experiences. But... we have ideas in the works to change this. Everyone one that we've had show up to more than one meeting has been hooked. So... we're taking a road trip to the Great Lakes regional this year, and bringing an assistant dean or two (as with RIT, engineering is it's own college. the dean is way too busy - and leaving the school- to bring, so we hooked the outreach dean and maybe the academic dean). hopefully once they see what goes on, how much we (college students) learn, and the recruitment opportunities, they'll bite. It's just hard to get them to go.
Another approach we've recently tried is to go cross college. The college of arts and sciences has an industrial design department (not sure if other schools have this or not - we're insanely large - I think you can major in underwater basketweaving.) They had Dean Kamen come to talk about his wheelchair to them and our ASME chapter, but he also ended up recruiting for DEKA and talking about FIRST, too. It really excited them, and long story short, I ended up having lunch with their dean and a few of the department chairs. They didn't help out this year, as they wanted to sit back and observe this first year. But... they were able to find someone to help us work on our animation - grad students work great for this sort of thing, as long as their advisor buys in. The ind. design folks were interested in the project to use a possible capstone project. (as the dean put it, our former robots "looked like they could use our help"

. that would make life fairly interesting - let the engineering side worry about the functionality, and the ind. design guys worry about looks, sponsor logos, tshirts, buttons, banners, etc. possibilities are endless.....It would certainly be a good business model to show how things work in industry
Just my thoughts,
Erik