Edwin Lemanski and I represented the Bronx County Chapter of NYSSPE at the Metropolitan Engineering Societies Council (MESC) Engineers Week celebration on the evening of Feb 19, 2015 at NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn.
We attended even though the weather was far from ideal and the location was not exactly convenient to get to from the Bronx. We drove – drive time from Riverdale was 65 minutes in rush hour, return was 35 minutes, and there was parking ($27) at the Marriott across from the school. We noticed the MetroTech Jay St subway station (A Train) was right at the entrance to the school.
It turned out to be an enjoyable event and certainly merited our support. Started with a buffet dinner – nothing fancy but good food. Then brief opening remarks by MESC Chair Wasyl Kinach, PE and then a welcome from our host, Richard Thorsen, Dept Chair and VP Emeritus, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, NYU Polytechnic. A note about the school – once known as Brooklyn Poly – it became New York Poly in 1973 when NYU closed its University Heights Bronx campus and merged its Engineering school with Brooklyn Poly – and then NYU reversed its earlier action and the school is now named NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.
Following the welcoming remarks, Sal Galetta, PE, presented the Engineers Week Proclamation from NYC Mayor de Blasio. Although the Proclamation intends to honor Engineers on EWeek, the mayor’s writers made sure that the Mayor’s agenda was the higher priority – opening with “Whereas by building additional affordable housing…” A copy of the full Proclamation will be posted on our website (www.BxNSPE.org).
The highlight of the evening was a talk by Philip Michael Tuts, Professor and Chair, Dept of Physics, Columbia University on “Engineering and Operation of the Large Hadron Collider, the Largest Instrument in the World”. That title was probably invented to support the one PDH which was granted for the talk. The actual talk was more interesting – focusing on the ATLAS Experiment (that the speaker collaborated on) which statistically proved the existence of the Higgs Boson particle resulting from the super high speed collision of protons. I will not attempt to repeat the talk but the information was presented in an understandable manner with just enough theoretical physics thrown in to underscore how much more work needs to be done in this area. Even if theoretical physics is not your thing, I would encourage anyone with a curiosity for scientific knowledge to catch a talk by Prof. Tuts. At this event, the Q and A had to be cut short because of time limitations.
My only negative comment is that I found the turnout to be a disappointment. About fifty in attendance. This event should have drawn a larger turnout.
Gee Eng, PE
2015Proclamation (pdf version)
