Adam Epstein '05

The 2008 FIRST Championship event was held April 17-19 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia Dome. I was able to travel to the event along with several other colleagues from WPI. Team 190 with students from The Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science mentored by WPI students and faculty was also there to defend their 2007 victory.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization devoted to promoting and encouraging young people to celebrate science and technology. There are three competitions within FIRST: FIRST Robotics Competition, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Lego League. All are geared towards students in high school and younger. Over 150,000 young people are involved in the FIRST program. To learn more and get involved, visit http://www.usfirst.org.

WPI has several special connections with FIRST. Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST, was a WPI student in the 1970s and holds an honorary doctoral degree from WPI. Team 190 is one of several teams that has competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition every year since its start in 1992, and we were also one of the first schools to offer FIRST scholarships (more on that below) to students entering college. This year we have a new special partnership with FIRST. On April 17 at the Championship, FIRST announced a new control system and software library that will be used by all teams competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition. This system was developed jointly by WPI students and faculty and National Instruments.

At the FIRST Championship, at least 300 teams were in Atlanta to compete. I had the chance to walk through the pit area where the teams feverishly prepare, diagnose, and repair their robots between their rounds of competition. To say the least, it was amazing! Each team calls itself by a creative name, wears crazy outfits, and works on their robots with amazing expertise. I have included some photos I took in the pit area (click photos to enlarge and read more on site; syndicated feeds will display photos only).

I mentioned above that WPI was one of the first institutions to offer scholarships to FIRST participants. We continue to offer scholarships, and they are some of the most generous available. Each year we offer a full tuition, four year scholarship to one student involved in the FIRST program. We have some other awards as well. I spent the day on Thursday and Friday at the competition in scholarship row where students, parents, mentors, and other guests stopped to get information about WPI and hear about our scholarship opportunities. A good number of admitted students, including all five of the 2008 FIRST scholarship initial recipients, stopped by to chat and get more information too!

To complete the event, WPI hosted a reception at the Ritz-Carlton Atlanta for prospective students, admitted students, alumni, and other members of the WPI community. President Dennis Berkey gave a welcome, and Ken Stafford, director of the Robotics Resource Center, spoke about the Robotics Engineering degree at WPI. Some students stayed for over two hours chatting with the WPI staff, faculty, and alumni! Photos of the event are included below.

I hope that your FIRST season went well if you are on a team. If not, visit the FIRST Web site to find out more information about getting a team started. Let me know what your best memory of the season was in the comments!

This past week was the busiest of the year in terms of visitors to the Admissions Office. High schools in Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—all popular areas for WPI—were closed for spring vacation weeks. All together we welcomed over 1,500 visitors last week! The Closer Look open house on Wednesday had record attendance, and other admitted students and juniors in the midst of their college search also visited.

I wanted to spend a moment thanking our volunteer student tour guides in the Crimson Key program for all of their effort this year, this month, and especially this past week. They were definitely all on their game this week! If you visited WPI at any point, I’d love to hear your feedback about the visit including the tour and tour guide either here in the comments section below or on our visitor feedback form.

The 2008 Awards Convocation was held this afternoon at WPI. This annual event recognizes the most outstanding members of WPI faculty, graduate student body, and community in various categories. Congratulations to the 2008 award recipients!

Sigma Xi Research Awards: Neil T. Heffernan, Yi Hua Ma, Neal Orman, Paola Pinzon-Arango, Kai Zeng
Teaching Assistant of the Year: Saurabh Vilekar
Romeo L. Moruzzi Young Faculty Award: Robert Lindeman, Joshua Rosenstock
Denise Nicoletti Trustees’ Award for Service to Community: Christopher Bartley
Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Academic Advising: Kristen Billiar
Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship: Joel Brattin
Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Teaching: Peter Christopher

Closer Look is our open house program designed specifially for students admitted to WPI. For the first time this year, the Admissions Office offered two Closer Look programs since we have seen so much interest among students wanting to visit campus that one last time before making their decisions. Our final event of the year is tomorrow (weather is looking favorable), and I expect that including open house visitors and other families visiting during their school vacation week, we’ll have over 1,000 visitors on campus!

The Closer Look programs are my favorite ones of the year. I can think back to when I was admitted to WPI, I attended the Closer Look (which that year was on my birthday!) and although we did not submit an enrollment deposit that day, that’s really when I knew WPI was the place for me. In the years since then, I gave tours, participated in the activities fair, worked as an intern, sat on student panels, and now this year helped plan the event. It is so exciting to see the campus in bloom, students active on campus, the fountain on, and the many visitors about to make such an important decision in their lives.

If you’ve attended one of our open houses, I’d love to hear how it was in the comments. If you’re just beginning your college search, stay tuned for more information about open house programs in the fall.

You may have noticed a new section on the right navigation bar called “Twitter Updates.”  Twitter is a microblogging service that allows for updates in 140 characters or less.  I’ve included my last five Twitter updates for you to get a flavor of what I’ve been up to between posts.  They’re usually pretty informal.  You can see my entire feed at Twitter / epsteada.

Meanwhile, I’ve returned from work in Atlanta, and it will be one of the busiest weeks of the year this week.  I plan to post about Closer Look and this past week’s FIRST championship.

Today is Project Presentation Day at WPI which means no undergraduate classes are in session but students who have been working on completing their Major Projects are presenting their findings to their project sponsors and advisors, the faculty, other students, and the community.

More than 250 project teams are giving formal presentations and poster displays. You may be interested in seeing some of the work WPI students have completed (list of all projects), and here is quick sample of projects that caught my eye:

• Pricing an Insurance Product – Roller Coaster Insurance (Mathematical Sciences)
• Environmental Assessment of Wachusett Brewing Company (Chemical Engineering)
• Wind Power from Kites (Mechanical Engineering)
• Understanding and Improving Customer Loyalty at the Sole Proprietor Restaurant (Management)
• Design of a Graduate Housing Complex at Gateway Park Future Laboratory Facilities (Civil and Environmental Engineering)

Later this week I’ll be traveling to Atlanta with to represent WPI at the FIRST robotics national championship event. Last year, the winning alliance included Team 190 of the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science, a high school team mentored and advised by WPI students and faculty. Let’s hope they can repeat!

If you are going to be in Atlanta and are admitted to WPI or a junior considering applying to WPI, please join us for a reception following the Friday activities. Stop by our table on scholarship row on Thursday or Friday for more information!

Good luck in Atlanta!

The fountain is on! :)

Spring is really starting to show itself this week at WPI!  Campus has been very active: baseball and softball games, frisbee on the quad, buds popping out on the trees, plenty of visitors, and lots of exciting events.  It’s the time of year when seniors are counting their remaining days while working hard on completing projects and presentations.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that the fountain will be on this week!

I’m mostly a winter person, but I can’t help but enjoy this time of year.  What are you most looking forward to this spring?

That’s right, I’ve been here at the office since about 7:45 this morning. We’re open for business in Admissions every Saturday this spring through May 10. Check out all of the options to visit WPI this spring, and we’ll hope to see you here or on the road!