Student Chapter Workshops

We are pleased to announce the Student Chapter Workshop Schedule for the 2020 Annual Student Conference. This year's program has been organized into 3 subject tracks to help students decide which sessions they would like to attend.  A bonus featured live student chapter workshop led by the Iowa State University Student Chapter will kick off these workshops at 7:00 AM PST.

Please find information on each of the workshops below.

Featured Live Student Chapter Workshop

7:00 AM – 7:30 AM PST: Virtual Student Chapters: How to Communicate and Engage Students Effectively

Presented by: Bailey McCrea, Spencer Wolfe, and Anna Buchholz, Iowa State University

ISU successfully transitioned to a virtual platform in March 2020 and will continue to do so for Fall 2020. This live presentation will cover all aspects of how a chapter operates and useful tools used to collaborate remotely.

Track I: Developing your Chapter

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM: Developing Your Mentorship Program

Presented by: Ryen O'Meara, Rachel Fetter and Jacob Keating, University of Michigan

Mentorship is a great way to involve and develop underclassmen in your chapter while fostering a tight-knit community within your ChE department. Come check out how the University of Michigan AIChE Chapter runs their mentorship program!

8:00 AM - 8:30 AM: AIChE Mentoring Program: Your Experience Is Mine

Presented by: Zelma Mejía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras

The AIChE mentoring program is a project design to provide freshman year students with a personalized senior student mentor in order to motivate, guide and teach them practical studying methods that could guarantee a good academic performance as well as a personal growth within the community and to embrace AIChE values like leadership, social conscience and proactivity. The social and academic committee of the National Autonomous University of Honduras student chapter came together to create this project as a response to a notorious increment in the failure rate in subjects such as Introduction to chemical engineering and general chemistry. We found out that some of the factors that influenced students’ performances were self-esteem, lack of motivation, studying habits and attention deficits. Furthermore, many freshman students didn’t have a clear idea on what exactly chemical engineering is. With the help of surveys and direct communication we were able to evaluate each student situation; thus, personalized activities were prepared for them such as one on one tutoring, forums and workshops. Wonderful that when we decide to share our knowledge with others, we realize that your experience is mine.

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM: How to Plan and Execute a Research Fair

Presented by: Paige Leland and Joseph Nelson, University of Utah

The University of Utah has been planning and executing research fair, similar to career fair but for people interested in undergraduate and graduate research opportunities. This workshop will go over why these fairs are important and effective at our school and how to successfully implement it in your chapter.

9:30 AM - 10:00 AM: How to Run a Career Meeting: Interview Preparation, Resume Review, and LinkedIn Help

Presented by: Hannah Boyce, Cameron Young, and Kamila Wawer, Northeastern University

As a school that utilizes co-ops in their curriculum, Northeastern students have to be prepared for job interviews as early as the fall semester of their sophomore year. Because of this, the NU chapter of AIChE runs a meeting every semester that includes resume review, interview preparation, LinkedIn assistance, and professional headshots. Upperclassmen give the advice, some of whom have gone on more than twenty interviews for co-op jobs. We want to run a workshop at the National AIChE Conference to give student leaders resources, such as interview tips and resume advice that our E-board has compiled over the years to guide each chapter in hosting their own career advancement meeting. We will then explain how to efficiently run a meeting that will allow all attending students to receive the help they need for any of these critical professional development skills.

Track II: Engaging your Chapter

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM: Remote Reach: Innovating K-12 Education in a Time of Social Distancing

Presented by: Mitchell Rogers, University of California, Los Angeles

In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, parents and educators have been tasked with the enormous responsibility of creating a dedicated, learning environment for their students at home. While shifting to an online medium has been challenging, it has provided a unique opportunity for AIChE at UCLA to support K-12 students through its new Remote Reach project. In Remote Reach, designing and delivering personalized, interactive lessons to students has proved to be a rewarding and enjoyable experience for members involved. The prospect of online education has enabled our chapter to establish several connections with schools and develop a new approach to outreach. At this workshop, we will introduce innovative ways our chapter has served hundreds of students in the greater Los Angeles community online, and how all student chapters can grow their own outreach programs in this ever-changing climate.

8:00 AM - 8:30 AM: Quarantine K12: A Solution To A Problem That Lead Us To Expand Our Efforts

Presented by: Zelma Mejía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras

When quarantine was declared in Honduras due the coronavirus outbreak; it was impossible for us to be in schools with the children, doing STEM experiments. Our Executive Board have been thinking “How can we still do the K12 program? Even with the distance limitations”. By some brainstorming we concluded that we could break distance barriers with the help of the internet, and that, was the moment in which our new strategy was born. We named it Quarantine K12 and it’s a series of videos filmed by our members in which they do STEM experiments from their homes; these videos, were sent to schools in different regions in our country. The teachers were of great help since they will be assigning them as homework for the kids to watch and probably do them at home.

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM: Tips and Tricks to Planning a Successful Kid's Day Camp

Presented by: Elizabeth Occhi, Brittany Workman and Katelyn Murhammer, University of Iowa

A priority for the University of Iowa's Student Chapter is to conduct outreach events for our local community, the primary event being a Kid's Day Camp. The purpose of this camp is to expose children(K-5) to chemical engineering by conducting a variety of experiments and activities that incorporate a variety of principals within engineering. For this workshop, our chapter will discuss the planning process involved with a successful day camps. This portion of the event will provide tips on selecting themes, choosing experiments, and deciding on a date and time. Not only that, but we'll discuss certain obstacles that we have encountered in the past and how we have surpassed them. These obstacles include; accounting for K-5 policies within our specific university, budgeting, and advertising. The primary goal of this workshop is to provide tools that every chapter can utilize to plan a successful Kid's Day Camp.

9:30 AM - 10:00 AM: Model Chem-E-Car Program: Operating a Large Organization Safely while Presenting Value to More Students

Presented by: Sarah Miller, Maggie Toepfer, and Mason Dyess, Iowa State University

ISU has qualified for Nationals 5 years in a row and serves over 80 students annually. We would like to show our structure and methods that go into building a winning team. We have more stringent requirements for design than AIChE requires which makes for a safer and more creative group of engineers.

Track III: Enriching your Chapter

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM: LEAPing Online: Maintaining Technical Proficiency at Home

Presented by: Nathaniel Torres and Jesus Muñeton, University of California, Los Angeles

Like many other student chapters across the country, AIChE at UCLA’s technical projects were put to a halt when administration announced that instruction during spring would be conducted remotely. Despite this, we continued supporting our members by running one project, the Lifetime Engineering Applications Project (LEAP), completely online. LEAP utilizes chemical engineering process simulators to model industrial chemical processes, while also providing students an ethical and economic perspective on industry. This presentation will explore our experience transitioning to an online technical project and how to adapt to changes in budget, participation, and scheduling. Starting with an explanation on the relevant experience LEAP provides to students pursuing careers in industry, we will express our motivation for moving online and what makes a project viable for online instruction. Afterwards, we will discuss maximizing the resources an online environment introduces, maintaining participation levels, and being as accommodating as possible for our project members.

8:00 AM - 8:30 AM: Diversifying Technical Projects: The Chemical Engineering Introductory Project

Presented by: Pavni Misra and Nolan Origer, University of California, Los Angeles

The Chemical Engineering Introductory Project (ChIP) is a technical project that allows participants to learn about fundamental chemical engineering principles and apply them by building a small-scale continuous process system in a team-oriented environment. In past years, our members have built coffee machines, cooling towers, and soap batch reactors as their final project. ChIP is aimed toward incoming freshmen and transfer students, and since its introduction three years ago, AIChE at UCLA has seen an increase in student participation in technical projects and other areas of the club. Topics covered in the workshop will include strategies and difficulties faced in implementing the coffee machine project, connecting coffee machines to core engineering fundamentals, and overall advantages that ChIP has to offer.

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM: Custom-built Thin Films – A Molecular Dynamics Perspective

Presented by: Patricia Taboada-Serrano, Poornima Padmanabhan and Obioma Uche, Rochester Institute of Technology

The workshop will introduce participants to multi-scale modeling, with the focus on molecular dynamics as a tool for custom-building materials for several applications including electronics, drug delivery and industrial processes. Steps necessary to develop representations of physical systems will be outlined and implemented within the LAMMPS software application for a simple example during the workshop. Students will learn how to analyze output and visualize results for the above demo. Using the demo as a framework, a more complex, industrially relevant example will be discussed to further demonstrate the breadth of capabilities of the molecular dynamics technique. The workshop will wrap up with a brief discussion on the recommended type of graduate training for a career in engineering custom-built materials using multi-scale modeling.

9:30 AM - 10:00 AM: Fuel Cells

Presented by: João Vitor Garcia Ferreira, Guilherme Warwick Parker Maia, Ana Carolina Barbeta and Juliana Frias, FEI University Center

We will present our work done with a team from the AIChE FEi student chapter on open cathode fuel cells. Within our chapter we do research from the production of hydrogen, quality of the same, assembly of the cells, increase of efficiency, simulations and among others.