CEED's biomedical camp | Virginia Tech Engineering

I think CEED is doing an incredible job of doing engineering education outreach to students that might not know all the possibilities. I actually only applied to Tech. I started with this interest in biomedical engineering late high school and wasn't even considering Virginia Tech at first. Once I came and toured, I kind of fell in love with the campus and fell in love with the field and knew right after that that this is what I wanted to do. We were both really excited to create this experience. Some of the inspiration behind it was our personal experiences and what got us into biomedical engineering. We really had to put ourself back into that mentality of 8th to 10th grade and try and recreate that for them. One of the really unique parts of the program was the place-based learning aspect of it. So we were driving to Floyd every day, driving to Wytheville every day to work with these students in their own school. They were comfortable in that environment. They were seeing teachers from their home school that they recognized. We took them to Virginia Tech and we gave them a campus tour, showed them a lot of the academic buildings, the residential buildings, told them all about our dorm experiences. One of the fun parts was being able to show them some of the different labs. I'm Brian and I want to be an aerospace engineer. We did a competition to pad a helmet. Whoever had the lowest score, won. Being able to show them these real world experiences of grad students and undergrads who were researching these topics that were similar to what we were teaching them at the camp, really brought everything home, and they were able to see the real life impact of, you know, the smaller projects that they were doing and how that could grow into something bigger. We had a lot of mini projects day to day, creating an egg crash course and tying it back to biomechanics. What are some of the safety factors of keeping someone safe in a vehicle? Having the combination of building the concepts out, having a hands on technique in mini projects, and then also seeing it in more of a real world context later on through the campus, visit really helped them build up on that concept and then see the possible career paths for that as well. One of the most important takeaways that I was really hoping the students would learn through this camp is just how capable they are. I was really hoping, especially in the field, like biomedical engineering, there's so many possibilities. Even if they didn't think they were very creative, that we could really instill that confidence in them. We really tried to expose them to as many career paths as possible. Maybe they had some pre notions of biomedical engineering. It’s not just one thing. There's so many possibilities within it. It was such a great experience to work with the kids.