Summer program sets up incoming engineering students for success

STEP stands for Student Transition Engineering Program. It is meant to be a bridge program into engineering to prepare students for their incoming fall semester. The pacing is a lot different, particularly coming out of high school classes, and so this gives opportunity for students to practice being an engineering student. Even though they're not for credit, what they take in the fall semester will be very, very similar to what they have during the summer. I hear a lot of people struggle with the first chem test which in this program all the weeks combine into the first tests like content and I've felt pretty confident learning the material but I think I would have done a slightly worse if not more so if I had had to learn all of it in two weeks rather than four what I've seen over the years is that students who get to know each other during step like they study together they hang out together it's like a new friend group and so you can definitely see them leaning on each other. I've met a lot of people here that I really think I could be close with in the fall especially because we're all there's some people who are living in the living learning community in Galileo or Hypatia or even Digerati. We have an industry partner at GE Vernova that comes and does an engineering design challenge with us. All of the engineers that come are VT alumni that have been through what these students are going through. I came to GE through STEP actually I was an RA seven years ago. So we come out teach them a little bit more about the application of engineering and design so that they can understand what the real world can sometimes be like. Talking to students you can really see that they they're passionate about engineering they really want to figure out what this is going to be like how to actually design something but also they get the teamwork aspect which is really important in college so I think it's just an opportunity for them to learn and they really do take it seriously which is great.