Interface – 2018 Fall
Link: http://interface.ecsdl.org/content/27/3/80.full.pdf+html
by Evan Jahrman
This Spring, the ECS University of Washington Student Chapter continued its dedication to two core missions: aiding members in their career development and positively affecting our community through outreach. Achieving these goals required ECS@UW to organize activities that prepared our members for conferences, provide opportunities for professional networking, teach elementary school students about electrochemistry, and host educational seminars for our members.
We proudly report that twenty-two of our members participated in the 233rd Meeting of the Electrochemical Society held this May in Seattle, WA. Prior to the conference, ECS@UW organized several events to position our members for success. Specifically, ECS@UW arranged multiple sessions for members to practice oral presentations and receive feedback from their peers prior to the conference. Moreover, Matthew Murbach, an ECS@UW member, planned eight Python tutorials held on a weekly basis leading up to the conference. These tutorials served to prepare students with minimal prior data science experience to fully participate in ECS Data Sciences Hack Week.
On May 24th, ECS@UW hosted its second annual Industry Panel. This year’s panel was selected according to the themes of clean energy and data science, thus embracing the recent boom in electrochemical publications at this intersection. Accordingly, ECS@UW partnered with the local Diversity in Clean Energy (DICE) student chapter to invite six panelists at organizations ranging from local startups to international corporations. Represented companies include Hive Battery, E8, Distributed Energy Management, DVN-GL, KPMG, and Doosan GridTech. Representatives were separated into two panels, the first fielding questions regarding startups and the second fielding questions on the transition from academia to industry. These panels were complemented by a networking session enabling students to interact with the local professionals. In total, the event spanned four hours. ECS@UW gratefully acknowledges sponsorship of this event by the Clean Energy Institute and eScience Institute.
On April 19th and 20th, ECS@UW participated in the University of Washington’s Engineering Discovery Days. At this event, UW students and faculty facilitated numerous hands-on experiments oriented toward 4th-8th grade students. This afforded elementary school students a fun environment for learning and the opportunity to witness the exciting nature of STEM research. Here, ECS@UW featured its popular electrodeposition experiment, “Enginearrings,” which involved the anodization of titanium wires to produce colorful patterns. These wires were then bent into earrings and distributed as keepsakes to attendees. In total, Engineering Discovery Days reached over 10,000 attendees and benefitted from the civic involvement of over 1,200 UW students.
Finally, ECS@UW continued its theme of educational seminars. This included a series of student-led, biweekly presentations on characterization techniques that concluded with presentations by Elena Pandres and Evan Jahrman on electron microscopies and x-ray absorption spectroscopies, respectively. This summer, ECS@UW will continue its “Coffee & Electrochemistry” book series with weekly discussions focused on the chapters of Electrochemical Methods by Bard and Faulkner.
Improving our community and aiding the career development of our members remains the central foci of ECS@UW.
ECS@UW and DICE members with representatives from Hive Battery, E8, Distributed Energy Management, DVN-GL, KPMG, and Doosan GridTech following our second annual Industry Panel.