Interview with the 2017 Laurentian University Mine Rescue (LUMR) club

A team from the Laurentian University Mine Rescue (LUMR) club recently won the 2017 Mine Emergency Response Development (MERD) competition hosted by the Colorado School of Mines in Denver. I sat down with Julien Lalande (team captain), Greg Moser (club president), and their staff adviser, Ethan Armit, to talk about the team’s history and recent successes. Continue reading

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A newbie’s reflections on SAE Baja California 2016

#BajaSoCal, because it is not an official event without a hash tag.

#BajaSoCal, because it is not an official event without a hash tag.

Better late than never, they say.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of SAE Baja; however, it is only the first time that I’ve had the privilege of attending an event. I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the four-day competition and provide a newbie’s wide-eyed take on the engineering awesomeness involved. Continue reading

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Interview with the Laurentian University 2016 OEC Consulting team

The Laurentian University Bharti School of Engineering 2016 Consulting Team (L-R): Jasmina Omri, Joey Fyfe, Tyler Provencal, Frédérique Bélanger.

The Laurentian University Bharti School of Engineering 2016 Consulting Team (L-R): Jasmina Omri, Joey Fyfe, Tyler Provencal, Frédérique Bélanger.

I had the opportunity to sit down with the four chemical engineering students (Jasmina Omri, Frédérique Bélanger, Tyler Provencal, and Joey Fyfe) who made up the Bharti School of Engineering’s Consulting Engineering team to ask them about their experiences. The group came in first at the 2016 Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) in Waterloo and then fourth at the 2016 Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) in Montreal. Continue reading

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Brunos and Smoots

We recently spent a lecture in my first year engineering course introducing the concepts of units, unit systems, and unit conversions. We talked about meters and feet. We discussed kilograms and slugs, pounds mass and pounds force. We even talked about esoteric units like furlongs and fortnights. But I realized afterward that I’ve short-changed their education by not mentioning two important engineering units: the bruno and the smoot. Both these units were created by (and named for) undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Continue reading

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