In the program,
currently, we have 29 different project teams. And over 1200 students, just over 1200, students that participate across
those 29 teams. And so there's a huge range of the types of activities and
also the sizes of the teams. So I think our smallest team, right now, is right around 12 to 15 students. And the biggest team is right around 100. It was just below, just over 100--100 students over the last year. And I tend to kind of, you know, bin those teams into sort of three differe
nt categories. And the first one is our engineering
design and build teams. And these are the ones that people are
often the most familiar with. It includes things like our Cornell Racing team, our Cornell Baja team, AUV, which builds an underwater autonomous
robot, rocketry, uh, Design Build Fly. There's there's a whole list of them but these are the teams that go through
a novel design and build cycle each year. And so they design a particular product like a race car and then they actually go
ahead and build it and all of its components. And more often than not these teams are
testing or validating their design and build by participating
in a national or international competition, at the end of that cycle. Not always, but most of those teams that is what they are doing. And this is particularly interesting to me for a couple of reasons. But I think the primary one is that it really does mimic the industry experience that a lot of our students might go to, you know, after their time
here at Cornell because they're given a
particular challenge but they're also given parameters that they have to stay
within while they try and find the most novel or the most
innovative of solution to that challenge. So sticking with Cornell Racing as an
example they have, they have many, many pages of
specifications that they have to stick to while they are designing and building that race car. So it's being as creative and as innovative as possible, within the constraints, you know, that
that
particular competition puts in place. So it's a very, it's very cool, real world kind of experience. And they have
something that flies or drives or swims at the end at the end of that
cycle. The second category that I tend to
think of is what I call our social impact teams.
And these are teams that work directly with the community partners, either
local or global. Many of these teams are sustainability focused and they work with partners on campus, in the local Ithaca community, but they also
work more broadly with partners across the country and several of them
even internationally. And these are typically in one to two year cycles. And so they are solving some particular problem for
their community partner. And they're doing sort of, you know,
needs finding and then a design and development or prototyping process within either a one or two year cycle.
And this is really cool because usually at the end of that cycle there is some deliverable that is given to that community partner
either
something that is built or something that they actually go and install and
implement. You know if that's an app, if it's an
irrigation system, if it's a you know, a bridge in some cases, but they're working directly with with a partner.
I tend to think of those as sort of client relationships but with a partner
who has a particular problem that needs to be solved. And then the third category is our computer science and data science teams. And these teams actually many of them also partici
pate in competitions,
several of them also work with campus and community
partners, but the thing that sort of unifies them for me is they are teams
that are solely focused just on the software
development side of things. So most of the other teams that I
mentioned actually have software and programming sub teams on them, but the computer science and data science teams are exclusively focused in that area. They do a lot of app development, a lot of
software development. It gives students a reall
y, you know, you
can have a really rich experience in sort of all parts of software and app development and in data science. The other unique thing about that
category of teams for me is they also have the strongest emphasis on education. So those teams are often
teaching or co-teaching a number of classes within computer science,
hosting workshops, hosting programs that will help people learn how to code,
learn how to do, you know, product development on the
software side of things. And so they
those are some of the biggest teams,
like this the teams that are right around 100 participants are
typically the comp sci teams. But they're actually impacting many
times that number of students per year because of their teaching and outreach activities. And so, that's kind of the other thing that,
even though they might have aspects that are similar with you know competitions
or working with partners, to some of the other teams the the focus purely on the kind of software side of the house an
d then
their focus on on education is really the thing that sort of unifies them as a
group.
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