Throughout the years, many guest speakers and presentations have come through the doors of room A214 on various Tuesday evenings. They facilitate dialogue and action on all things engineering with the Jesuit Engineering Society (JES). The club allows its members to develop ideas after learning about science to “work on projects of mutual interest” as its Moodle page says.
This year, the members of the Jesuit Engineering Society have formulated ideas and proposed several projects extending from culinary science to electrical engineering.
The club’s moderator and well-known Physics and Engineering teacher, Ms. Julie Carver, described their first semester as “hard because a lot of it is planning rather than building” and the second semester as “when we usually have our big builds.” This year, the long-established tradition continues.
For the past three months, some of last year’s projects have been continued, such as the infinity mirror, along with new proposals, such as the culinary science project. The infinity mirror was started last spring by lead engineers Patrick Keyes ‘19, Jorge Lopez ‘19, and Ian Smith ‘19, and was described as an “truly innovative illusion that’ll fascinate the minds of many” by sophomore Jorge Lopez.
In the past, the JES has had various guest speakers come in from Texas Instruments, FOD Aircraft, and has had conversations with aerospace engineering students, neuroscientists, students from UT Southwestern, and a petroleum engineer who was in Qatar via Skype. When asked about the JES’s plans to hold a presentation for future visitors, Ms. Carver mentioned that this year “we don’t have any scheduled yet.” The JES plans “to try to get all those people again;” however, “most of those are going to have to be second semester, unfortunately.”
Some JES members take advantage of the many opportunities offered by the club, notably with the aquaponics team. The aquaponics team, arranged by lead engineers Luke Theivagt ‘17 and Jacob Totah ‘18, plan to compete on this year’s Environmental Education Initiative (EEI) competition, organized by the City of Dallas EEI Team WaterWorks and the University of North Texas.
Ms. Carver said that the previous year, “we had the fracking team win second place.” That team was organized by Joey Merkel ‘17, Dan Carver ‘16, Jeremy Lane ‘16, Joe Carver ‘17, and Jack Whelan ‘17.
Because this is one of the only competitions this year, the JES relies on a favorable outcome to earn funding for subsequent projects. Furthermore, “[the aquaponics team is] going to be presenting in the spring to see if they’re going to get a prize,” stated Ms. Carver. In the meantime, some club members have also proposed a water conservation project, which will “be present[ed] to get funding” and is “kind of like aquaponics–we’re trying to get funding.”
Stay tuned to see which fantastic projects the JES takes on next!
