For the May/June spotlight, we invited our ITE Student Chapters to share what they have been doing during this new normal of online coursework and off-campus life. The following Chapters shared how they are keeping their members connected.

UCLA

ITE at UCLA has switched quickly to online webinars and workshops via Zoom! We have weekly trivia socials using Kahoot to stay connected, and we still have our weekly meetings on Zoom as well.

-Joceline Suhaimi, Chapter President

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Cal Poly ITE is springing ahead. We quickly adjusted our plans for the rest of the school year to go virtual. To keep our members up to date, we created a Slack with various channels such as transportation news, announcements, etc. Every week we have some sort of event. We continue to have general meetings with companies and professors in order to keep in touch with the transportation industry. When we don’t have general meetings planned, we open our officer meetings to all members to give them an opportunity to understand the internal functions of our chapter. Lastly, we have planned fun online socials to keep connected!

-Kezia Suwandhaputra, Chapter President

UC Berkeley

Due to the change to virtual instruction, Cal ITE has wrapped up this academic year slightly differently than usual. Usually, Cal ITE and the Cal Transportation Team cohost a banquet in order to celebrate the year’s events together. However, this year, the team focused on virtually designing t-shirts and stickers together! Through the input from all the students, we were able to design a shirt that everyone will be proud to wear and a sticker to decorate our Hydroflasks to proudly rep Cal ITE.   In addition, the Fehr and Peers team was very accommodating and hosted a virtual presentation and Q&A to introduce students to various ongoing projects. Through this event, students were able to continue to connect with one another and with industry professionals. Although these are interesting times — to say the least, Cal ITE is proud to have finished the semester strong. In the upcoming months, we hope to host virtual FE studying sessions, among other events!

One of the last events our chapter was able to host was game night! See above for the photo of us all together, circa pre-6ft-apart times.

-Amy Huang, Chapter President

Oregon State University

Oregon State University’s ITE student chapter has been trying to maintain as “normal” of a spring term schedule as possible. We held our spring term General Meeting this past Tuesday, an informational meeting to generate interest for this term’s events, get feedback as to what fall term events our members want, and introduce our newly-elected officers for 2020-2021. Because we usually provide food at in-person meetings, we did a drawing for food-related gift cards. In the upcoming weeks, we are really excited for:

• A virtual presentation from a project manager at the Portland Bureau of Transportation, who will speak about their career and how “a normal day” has changed for them during this pandemic;
• An hour-long Introduction to Synchro webinar;
• A virtual civil engineering-themed trivia event, hosted jointly with our ASCE student chapter;
• Launching a mentoring program to connect our juniors/seniors with professionals.
• A bi-weekly transportation discussion group focused on engaging our graduate student members (interested undergraduate students are welcome, too). We meet for an hour (virtually) every two weeks to talk about transportation topics, the projects we’re working on, ask questions and get feedback, and just generally connect with each other. Under “normal” circumstances, we’d be split across different graduate offices, so I think this discussion group is really helping bring us together as a more cohesive graduate group–more so than before COVID started!

To get the word out about our events this term, we contacted professors currently teaching transportation classes to ask them to share our upcoming events with their students. Many already had assignments to attend a professional development event virtually this term, so our chapter events fit in well with their course requirements. We are also advertising events in both our department and ITE weekly messages. Our newly-elected officers, who took over this term from a fantastic group of outgoing officers, have been superstars in making ITE at OSU happen despite the pandemic!

-Amy Wyman, Chapter President

Contributions to the Endowment Fund can be made at westernite.org/endowment-fund/endowment-fund-contribute/