Friday, July 18, 2008

Recruiting in the Adirondacks

Mr. Ray Appleby (Manager, Pilot Operations) and myself made the trip to Warrensburg for the fourth year in a row to recruit at the DEC camps that are held there each summer.  The camps consist of high school students aged 15-17 from all around New York State.  A total of eight weeks of camps are held with each group of 50 students at camp for a week.  We will be presenting at two camps this year.

The camps are held at the Pack Demonstration Forest, one of the properties owned by SUNY-ESF.  The college leases the camp facilities to the DEC for the summer in order to hold the camps.

We gave a presentation called "Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry:  The Secrets of Money," which discusses the various techniques of papermaking, chemistry, and printing used in producing our currency to prevent counterfeiting.  The presentation also provides information about the college and particularly the programs in Paper and Bioprocess Engineering while entertaining the students with a variety of demonstrations of chemistry, engineering, and physics (Yes, we do set off a small explosion).  We leave the students with material about our programs and college.  DSC_0311

 

 

 

 

We are feel this to be an effective recruiting tool as we are able to reach high school students all over the state at one time and have had students visit ESF as a result of this presentation.

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Tuesday, July 1, 2008

New Students for Fall

This fall, we will be welcoming 33 new undergraduate students (as of today) to the Department of Paper and Bioprocess Engineering at SUNY-ESF.  This represents the largest incoming class of new students over the past ten years. 

Eleven of the new students are enrolled in the Paper Engineering program, which is accredited by Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET.  This program prepares students with a chemical engineering curriculum that is focused primarily on the paper and allied industries.  However, previous graduates of the program have also gone on to work in other industries.  Of the eleven students entering, nine are freshman and two are transfer students, with all of them coming from New York State.

Twenty-two students are enrolled in the Bioprocess Engineering program, which is our new program that started in 2006.  This program, which can be described as "chemical engineering without the petroleum," is focused on process and product engineering from sustainable resources and using ecologically-sound technology.  Nineteen freshman and three transfer students will be entering the program, with two of them coming from outside of New York State.

The entering freshman come highly qualified, with an average SAT score (verbal + math) of 1160 and a high school average of 90.0.  These scores mirror almost exactly the entire freshman class at SUNY-ESF.  The average SAT score of college-bound students that took the SAT in 2007 was 1017 (www.collegeboard.com) indicating that the students entering our programs (and ESF) are ready for college.   The five transfer students entering the programs had an average GPA of 3.44 at their previous institution.

We are looking forwarding to welcoming these new students in the fall.