Engineering: Kickoff

Hello everybody and welcome to the Engineering LLC. Nicole Vigon, Aaron Siewert, and Charlie Ross are the resident assistants of the Engineering LLC in South Tower. Nicole and Aaron are new resident assistants this year, while this is Charlie’s second year of being a resident assistant. Aaron is in his second year at UWM studying mechanical engineering. Nicole is also a second year student at UWM, but is studying biomedical engineering. And Charlie is a fourth year student at UWM studying mechanical engineering. Charlie was one of the resident assistants on the all male floor in West Tower last year. So this year, all three of us are new to South Tower as RAs and are looking forward to running the Engineering LLC.

For our kickoff event, we wanted to host an event that acted as an informative and fun activity to get our community members involved and excited about their majors. This event also gave them a wonderful opportunity to meet and become friends with fellow members of the Engineering LLC. For our kickoff event, we thought it would be great to have engineering student organizations make an appearance and present their organization. This also acted as a recruitment event for the organizations and allowed our residents to join this organizations very early in their engineering collegiate years. We invited all of the engineering organizations on campus, however, only four were able to make an appearance. Those four organizations included: UWM Baja Society of Automotive Engineers, UWM Society of Women Engineers, UWM Triangle Fraternity, and UWM American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

After each of those four organizations gave a presentation, the Engineering LLC members, student organizations, Engineering RAs, and RLC Ethan Sykes all socialized while eating pizza and drinking soda. This was a time where the RAs and Ethan Sykes really initiated conversation amongst the LLC community members and got them talking amongst each other by implementing a game. The game was people bingo, where the LLC community members were given a sheet that had several questions on it that required them to meet someone who met the requirements of the question. For instance, one of the questions on the bingo sheet was to go and meet three different people who also have your major. The intent of this game was to get the LLC community members out of their comfort zone and initiate conversation with new people. A major incentive to play the game, was that if you completed the bingo sheet, you could win an Engineering LLC t-shirt. 

All in all, the event lasted longer than expected and the LLC community members really hit it off with each other. That’s what we wanted to see for this kickoff event, and it certainly didn’t fail considering the residents spent over an hour just socializing in Flicks. We were very pleased to see the blooming and development of our LL community members. A big concern for our LLC floors, was that most of the residents would be overly introverted and not develop any sort of friendship with each other, or develop community in the lounges and such.

We already hosted our two day event of the annual Engineering Olympics this semester. This event challenges our participating residents in completing problems within a group and doing it the most efficiently. The winners names were put on a plaque on the 9^th floor lounge, and will remain there as a part of history in the LLC! We are also going to Discovery World this upcoming Saturday as our next event! A lot of the residents have been talking about this particular event and are excited to experience going to Discovery World for the first time!