The Northern Rio Grande STEM Col-Lab hosted an Engineering Day in late-February that gave local high school students an opportunity to learn about different types of engineering from the faculty at Northern New Mexico College. About twenty students from McCurdy Charter High School in Española attended the day, and an additional ten students from Northern's High School Equivalency Program (HEP) also attended.

Besides offering a variety of hands-on learning experiences, the students were also encouraged to tour the campus and learn about Northern’s College of Engineering programs and scholarships.

Dr. Jorge Crichigno, Director of the Information Engineering Technology program at Northern spoke with students about networks. “Networking is becoming an increasingly important skill for modern societies,” said Dr. Crichigno. “It was great to be able to share some of the basics with the high school students. Maybe some of them will even be back as IET students here in the future.”

Dr. Vishal Mehta spoke with students about Solar Energy, which is a unique concentration in Electromechanical Engineering offered at Northern. A variety of topics were covered during the day in hopes that students would attend the demonstrations that most interest them.

Title III STEM Outreach Coordinator Barbara Coulter helped to organize Engineering Day. She said that overall the event achieved its purpose, but an unfortunate gas leak situation kept Española Valley High School students from attending the day. Coulter hopes the Española Valley students will be able to attend similar events in the future.

"We are excited about our next big outreach event, STEM Career Day, coming up Wednesday, April 13," said Coulter. "We will have a wide variety of STEM professionals on hand to discuss STEM careers with current and future students."

Photo above: Students attending Dr. Steve Cox's interactive computer engineering demonstration prepare to witness "screaming carrots" during Engineering Day at Northern.