I’ve mentioned the orientation week that we are planning a few times on this blog, and have decided it’s time to go a bit more in depth on what the week is all about—especially since it’s starting tomorrow.

The Polytechnic will be offering a degree in biomedical engineering (BME) for the first time starting this coming year, so the incoming 2015 BME students are the pioneer class. At the Polytechnic, all first year students attend a week long orientation (grouped my major) their first week of classes. The orientation is intended to introduce them to resources at the Polytechnic, and help lay the necessary groundwork before they begin their schooling; their orientation lasts a few hours every day, for five days. At Rice, first year students also attend a week long orientation, but it is a bit different from the Poly’s. We are grouped by dormitory, it lasts 10-12+ hours a day for five days, and orients us to Rice campus, college life, and academics.

One of our tasks this internship was to create an orientation week for the incoming BME students at the Poly, that lay somewhere in the middle between Rice’s and the Poly’s existing orientation weeks. Since the Poly students attend the orientation week activities with their majors, we were able to focus exclusively on the incoming BME students and work with the BME faculty; this was helpful, as we learned from the faculty that they wanted an orientation to being an engineer, not just an orientation to being a student. Throughout the past nine weeks, we’ve been meeting with different faculty members at the Poly, consulting Rice faculty, and talking to upperclassmen Polytechnic students to understand the need and objectives for this orientation week.

We’ve focused the week to four main objectives: help the students understand the skills necessary to be a successful BME student, understand the resources at the Polytechnic, build a network of peers, and understand the job of a BME. Using these objectives, we constructed a weeklong schedule of activities and lectures to get our main points across. Choosing and scheduling the events was the most difficult part of this planning process, as we wanted to ensure the week felt cohesive and the information digestible, while maintaining student interest and getting our points across.

We then constructed the lectures and gathered materials for the activities we had planned. While this task at first seemed overwhelming, we had a lot of help from Dr. Saterbak (a Rice bioengineering professor), Dr. Wettergreen (a Rice design professor), Mr. Vweza, and Mr. Mafuta (both Polytechnic electrical engineering faculty).

After all of our planning, the orientation week finally begins tomorrow! We will have 42 incoming BME students throughout the week, and we are excited to get started. Our week will consist of events that…

• Introduce student life at the Polytechnic. This includes a tour of the Polytechnic, a lecture on student skills, faculty introduction, “tips and tricks” for success at the Poly, library and resource introduction, academic rules and regulations, and things like paying fees/getting IDs made.
• Teach basic engineering concepts and skills. This is done primarily through a week-long explanation and execution of the design process through tacking a real engineering problem. This process will include things like brainstorming, decision making, and a materials workshop.
• Increase understanding of biomedical engineering. Activities will include a lecture on the BME curriculum, BME career paths, talks from industry workers in the field of BME, a visit to PAM and QECH, and stories of various successful biomedical technologies.
• Form a community among the BME students. This includes welcoming activities and icebreakers, a huge scavenger hunt, working closely in a team of 6 throughout the week, team formation activities, and a matriculation ceremony.