Week One, Week Done

Wow.

A lot of things happened this week, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. I doubt that it would be possible to actually list the full number of things we’ve done this week, but I’ll sure try.

Well, to start, I’m gonna throw a little background information at you guys. Alex Acosta and I are acting as hosts for the international interns participating in iSEED, and they all flew in on Saturday/Sunday. We received 2 of the Brazilian interns on Saturday, Bruno and Luis, with the last intern Carlos, arriving on Sunday afternoon. All 4 interns from Malawi arrived at the same time on Sunday afternoon, coincidentally when I was out of the room. Upon my return, I heard from Alex that Dr. Leautaud was graciously offering to buy us all Chipotle (an idea which I was a fan of), and we helped the Brazilian interns place their orders, since the Malawian interns were with her.

On Monday, after a brief introduction to the program we did a ton of icebreakers. Following those, we went and got Rice IDs for the international interns. Upon our return, we  went through an overview of the general schedule for the summer, then lunch followed after another presentation. After we had been fed by the pizza wizard, the iSEED interns were dropped off at a presentation by the Office of International Students & Scholars (OISS). While they attended this, some very important things began to happen. We waited for the presentation to end, and Jeremy (our TA for the summer) left to get a mobility scooter for one of the interns (Tiwonge) who unfortunately had been in an accident immediately before her flight and had been walking with a limp this entire time.

The rest of us showed up to the OISS to find Jeremy doing donuts on the scooter. The obvious decision given an electric scooter and a small amount of time to kill before the presentation ended was to do time trials around a small square walkway near the office. I’m proud to say that writing to you right now is the SEED 2017 Mobility Scooter Race Grand Prix Grand Champion. Clocking in at a time of 23.37s I took the victory for myself. With the presentation’s end, we headed off to the zoo to perform a scavenger hunt that Jeremy reused from last summer, hoping all the animals listed as clues would still be there. They weren’t. We split into teams in order to finish the hunt, and I’m not sure if most of the groups continued the actual game until we left. My team definitely gave up on the hunt and decided to just enjoy the zoo about 60% through the trip. The best team (my team), is pictured below.

The best Scavenger hunt team featuring (from left to right): Tori, Jake, Me, & Tiwonge

For the sake of not having you read my rambling for 3 years, I’m gonna condense the rest of this week into like 2.3456678 paragraphs. On Tuesday, we went further in depth on what the expectation were for this summer, in terms of intern responsibilities, TA responsibilities, and project progress/completion. We spent the rest of the day doing various activities, such as splitting into multi-national teams and doing presentations on snapshots of the cultures of our various homes.

A deconstruction activity we did on Tuesday

On Wednesday, it got real. Bootcamp had begun. Bootcamp is pretty much an entire semester-long course (ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering Design) jammed into 5 days. Sounds like a good time right? This involved watching videos (at 2x speed for the sake of being impatient) each night and taking short quizzes based on the content of those videos. We visited the zoo again, since our project for an accelerated project we were doing for Bootcamp is an enrichment device (provides mental stimulation for an animal in captivity) for the okapi in the Houston Zoo. The following days we spent learning about and applying the Engineering Design Process to this project, and currently, my team has finished brainstorming component ideas and assembling them into some complete solutions which we can evaluate. The tool we used is called a morph chart, and we also made (ample) use of sticky notes during our brainstorming as well. This last task brought us to the end of Thursday, as I write to you this Friday morning. I haven’t actually looked at the schedule for today, so I can only guess what it is we are doing, but I can safely say it’ll be engineering.

P.S. Next week I’ll tell you guys about the electric bike that I’m building in my room!

My Bootcamp experience in one image

 

A few sticky notes that we used during brainstorming

SIDE STORY: Upon the return of Dr. Leautaud and the Malawi interns with the Chipotle, one of the greatest tragedies of 2017 occurred. I walk downstairs to the Martel commons to find that my fate was sealed: my burrito had been lost. (Dr. Leautaud gave me her burrito however so I didn’t die or anything :^))

One Response

  1. Rachel Buissereth at |

    So proud of you Kelvin!

    Reply

Leave a Reply