A new opportunity opens up for ICC’s science and engineering students

ICC’s new Engineering Club is ready to explore ideas for future projects, with the help of 50 members and three advisors ready to make those ideas into reality.

The president of the Engineering Club, Zachary Frontone, decided to help found the club so students interested in science and engineering can have a space to explore their creativity.

If students wish to join the Engineering Club, they can contact Frontone at zf046@lab.icc.edu to get details about future meetings.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Schylar Velez Garza

To start off with, what all was spoken about at the meeting that you just attended?

Zachary Frontone

We voted on our vice president and we filled up the rest of the officer roles. We discussed who’s interested in what project.

Since we do have 50 members, not everyone can show up. So we are waiting to see where the rest of the votes tally. 

We also talked a lot about our Academic Support Committee. We have two very talented people in charge of it and organizing it at the moment. If anyone needs help, they are there. They don’t have to necessarily be a part of the club. If you show up and you ask for help, we will get you some help.

SVG: What projects do you guys have in the works? Can you give me any specifics?

ZF: We’re not really in the work stage quite yet. Although we do have a good idea of what we will be doing.

Our Vice President made an amazing presentation with all the project ideas and we also have the official poll that our Treasurer put out.

SVG: So do you have any projects you guys are interested in doing?

ZF: The additive manufacturing of drones is pretty popular. It’s a competition to see who can make a very robust and easily manufacturable drone, that’s also extremely cheap.

We might also do an elevator pitch.

So for the elevator pitch, it will help people to get and build good resonating skills, as well as do more soft skills in practice.

There’s also a bot boogaloo competition. Essentially, you make a little bot, and it goes through and follows a line.

After we figure out where all the interest is, in the next meeting we will break out into all the different committees, because that’s how our system works.

We have a permanent committee and a temporary committee. Temporary committees are the ones that handle all the individual things with the projects.

It all just depends on where the interest is, and we will definitely know where all the interest is by next time.

These are just all the project ideas. Some of these are based off of competitions, but since we are coming in this a little late, a lot of the deadlines have already passed. But these projects are still really good to put on resumes and also good experiences.

We might be able to go ahead and still do these competition-based projects, and possibly still get funding for it.

Most of our funding is going to be from fundraising and from the college itself.

SVG: Do you have any fundraisers planned?

ZF: At the moment, we do not, but we have some ideas floating around.

I know the club in the past did a Smash tournament.

We were also thinking if we have some projects that go to completion, we could essentially hold some sort of event where people come and see these things launch.

SVG: Will these projects be done during this semester, or next semester?

ZF: Most of these projects are for this semester as well as the fundraisers. 

Though if we don’t finish a project, we will definitely have it to where next semester we can have a leg up in the competition. If they do decide to do a competition, like in a NASA or a government competition.

The only real issue for this semester is that a lot of the due dates have passed, So we are going to be working very closely with our freshmen to see where the interest lies on what competitions they would like to do.

SVG: You mentioned the Academic Support Committee. Is this a member-only thing, or is it possible that anyone could receive help from you?

ZF: We have a document and it has all the different classes. We are putting emails and names next to each class of who can actually help.

Only members can put their email and name into each of the categories. It is essentially a tutor service, which is all volunteer.

But we also have a tool where anyone can come in. If somebody is not in the organization, we can help them out.

SVG: This club, although focused on mainly engineering, it’s not strictly for engineers. Is it for anyone interested in the sciences?

ZF: Yes. We have actually reached out to a lot of professors, and we have gotten some good research opportunities.

In these research opportunities, you look at a topic, you write a paper on it, with the help of a professor.

You could do something like look into magnetic fields, or you could look into particle physics more, or you could look into AI. We actually have someone doing a research project on AI.

Anyone can come in and research something. If there’s interest there, then it will go forward.

There might be a few big projects and then a lot more individual-based research projects, where it might only be two or three people researching something, which is pretty common for research projects.

SVG: Are these research papers that students can use for their career, or is this merely just a hobby.

ZF: So that’s the amazing thing about this, students can publish these papers. It’s a good resume builder.

In fact, we have one person with a research paper, which they’ve been doing before this club, and they are actually taking their paper up to a conference in Canada.

These are definitely legit papers. If you can get it peer reviewed and published, then these are papers that can help you further your career.

Another big thing we want to do is become an integral part of the college in delivering opportunities to students. So we have been reaching out to a lot of the professors and a lot of different organizations inside of the college. And we are still planning on reaching out to more.

We are also hopefully going to be involved in more job fairs and more opportunities with internships, as well as the research opportunities.

Hopefully, we can just be a central hub for finding these opportunities.