For the past few summers, I have found solace from scooping ice cream for minimum wage by going outside.

Sometimes that is just walking my dog, sometimes that’s going on a run, but the most memorable times are when I decide to go hiking.

Growing up in western North Carolina, I am always close to many hiking trails when I’m home. That also means my friends in my hometown are as well, and I always see their posts of their adventures.

Scenic sunsets over a gaping gorge, cloudless skies above a dizzying overlook, photos of their destinations populate my timeline, but I never see evidence of the hike itself.

When I think back to my favorite hikes the past few years, the views never come to my mind first.

I always remember the forest and the friends I brought along the way.

Planning a hike always centers around the destination, whether it’s going to the peak of some bare rockface or finding a secluded waterfall, but that dismisses the miles in between, where I have gotten the most value from each experience.

Sometimes the trees shrouding the trail overshadow the final peak on a hike. I have driven up to a trail many times and am greeted by a fleeting rainstorm, but pushing on, I see a different kind of view within the woods.

I believe rain is the best thing to happen to a hike with a bad view, as it somehow amplifies the surrounding trees and makes you feel like you’re in some enchanted forest.

Maybe I didn’t get to see the view I wanted to, but rain can create even more precious wonders in the woods.

Other times the hike is the feat of wonder itself. A cold, steep, nine-mile hike I did a year ago isn’t remembered for the views at the top of the mountain, but for the feeling of completion at the summit. After dry-heaving my way up the mountain, I was overjoyed to finally stand on level ground and give my legs a rest.

The journey down was a triumphant one, and the many times I rolled my ankle during the descent could not dull the feeling of accomplishment from the hike.

Some hikes provide nothing at face value, but just finishing them is the memorable part.

My friend and I set off on a hike to a pair of waterfalls one afternoon, and everything went south halfway in. We passed the first falls, and decided to keep going and stop at the second one.

Before we could even get near it though, we got lost and narrowly avoided stepping on a copperhead, and some ominous clouds sent us running back to our cars.

The clouds split open and launched a torrential downpour on us, not refraining from striking nearby trees and making us cower to the ground.

Admittedly, the experience sounds and was awful, but we survived, and that’s why I remember it fondly.

Anything that could have gone wrong did, and that’s what hiking is about: putting yourself at the will of nature.

Maybe the hike seems ruined by rain or the trail tries to do you in, but there’s some intrinsic beauty that can always be found in hiking.

This is what is lacking from some hiking post on Instagram, everything nature throws at you that is not picture-perfect.

The views may be stunning from the top, but the trail itself is always aglow with opportunities for memories to be made on a hike.

Embracing the journey itself can yield much more than the destination on a hike, and I encourage any hiker to revel in the moments in-between and between nature and good company.

As students returned to campus this fall, they may have noticed signs popping up around Tech encouraging them to skip the drive and travel by foot or bike across campus.

These signs are part of the MOVE Georgia Tech initiative, which seeks to get more students using active transport to benefit their mental and physical health.

“We need to include and celebrate every form of active transportation on campus,” said Becky James, organizer of MOVE Georgia Tech.

James said that her previous work focused on encouraging bike and scooter use around campus, but at the start of this year she was tasked with encouraging all active ways of transportation to increase students’ physical health.

James, who commutes to campus by bike, cited the impact active transportation can have on mental health as another reason for this initiative.

“Mental health is something that we actively have to include in our day to look out for ourselves,” James said, and she believes that biking or walking somewhere is one way that Tech students can bolster their mental wellbeing during the day.

The physical embodiment of the project came from an experience James had a few years ago, where she saw a sign at a bus stop informing riders that an eight minute bus ride was actually a twelve minute walk.

James noted that walking and biking could be highly efficient means of transportation compared to driving, and wanted to show Tech students how long it would take to get to various locations around campus.

James said she used a combination of Google Maps and Citymapper to find the travel times around campus.

Citymapper is a program specifically for calculating active transportation times, and is not based around driving like other mapping services.

From the two apps, James was able to list the average time it took someone by foot or by bike to get anywhere on campus.

James also said Citymapper recently added ADA-compliant times to its app, but she admitted that it is likely an incomplete data set. “As we go forward [with] MOVE Georgia Tech, I want to make sure that we’re learning more and really seeking those students that are on our campus and what kind of wheelchairs are there,” James said.

She also noted that some of the walk and bike times may be inaccurate because of individual variations in transportation speeds, but the estimates on the signs are still good guidelines on travel times.

The MOVE Georgia Tech initiative includes 30 physical signs posted around campus, which offer the travel times by foot, bike, or wheelchair to various locations around campus.

Each sign also has a QR code that brings up the Citymapper website to help students find the fastest route to anywhere on or around campus located on the sign.

In addition to the physical signs, the initiative also has digital signs that appear on monitors around campus.

Besides the benefit to students’ mental and physical health, MOVE also aims to reduce the individual carbon footprint of students.

“The biggest chunk of carbon emissions comes from the transportation industry,” said James, “and from that transportation sector, that largest piece is coming from individual vehicles.”

Tech is aiming to be a carbon neutral campus by 2050, and cutting down on individual vehicle emissions is an important part of that goal.

By encouraging students to walk, bike, or scoot around campus, the Institute hopes to reduce emissions from cars and buses, allowing for a start on the process of becoming eco-friendly.

If nothing else, James wants students to choose active transportation because it is much cheaper than owning and operating a car.

Walking or biking requires much less money to do over the course of a year and is a way to get exercise in, something that is often challenging for Tech students to do with a schedule crammed full of classes, extracurricular activities and friends.

James said all these factors make active transportation the much healthier and economically efficient choice for getting around campus, and she hopes to see the positive effects of the initiative begin appearing around campus, in both students and faculty, soon.

On Sept. 2, President Ángel Cabrera gave his annual institute address where he highlighted Tech’s achievements over the past year and items to look forward to in the coming months.

Cabrera delivered his address in person in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and streamed the event on YouTube. In addition to a masked audience, Cabrera spoke to over 750 viewers who streamed the event.

After a brief introduction by Renee Kopkowski, Vice President of Institute Communications, Cabrera started his speech by discussing the previous and current impact the COVID-19 pandemic has on campus.

“We are still in the middle of a difficult and long public health crisis that will continue to test us in countless ways,” Cabrera said. He reported that many on campus had voiced their concerns about safety as well as the challenges that the pandemic has continued to bring.

He went on to describe a more positive side of the situation — the way in which the community came together. “We are in this together, and, like we did last year, we will navigate successfully through this together.”

He listed many ways that students, faculty and staff were able to come together to control the pandemic on campus, including transitioning to virtual learning, participating in surveillance testing and administering vaccines to nearly all members of the Tech community. “We learned that a community challenge like this can only be fought successfully by a community coming together,” he said.

Cabrera addressed the changes in COVID-19 policy this year and the resentment that they have generated.

The University System of Georgia has implemented policies and rules that look much different from the previous school year. For example, mask-wearing is no longer enforced on campus, classrooms are not socially distanced, and most classes are required to be taught in person.

“I realize many would prefer different policies at the state level. I appreciate all that feedback, and I assure you that I am in constant communication with state decision-makers. Our colleagues in the System office and the mem- bers of the board are fully aware of our circumstances. We will continue to work with them to convey data from Georgia Tech and propose ideas.”

Cabrera then urged everyone to use widely available COVID-19 safety resources — all of which are offered by Tech — to keep everyone on campus as safe as possible.

The measures he described included vaccination, wearing masks when inside campus buildings, utilizing surveillance testing each week, reporting symptoms and positive tests to contact tracing and quarantining when necessary.

In particular, Cabrera praised the research and coordination that went into Tech’s surveillance testing program, which was a staple of controlling the spread of COVID-19 on campus last year. He also emphasized the measures put in place this year to make the return to in person classes possible, highlighting staff efforts to install air purifiers in each classroom. Despite all of last year’s challenges, Cabrera noted that the year was still a remarkable one for Tech.

“We recruited our largest, most diverse class, we graduated our largest class, we won more research awards, and had more economic impact than ever before,” he said. “This would have been a great year, even under the most favorable circumstances.”

Cabrera acknowledged his colleagues who made a particularly incredible impression on campus in the last year. This included the deans, members of the Cabinet, leaders in campus associations and others who were critical to the Institute’s affairs.

Cabrera also highlighted other achievements Tech saw in the last year.

“We are not only the fastest growing institution in the state, but The Chronicle [of Higher Education] listed us as one of the top ten fastest growing institutions in the nation for the past decade,” he said.

Cabrera also noted that Tech was listed by the University System of Georgia as, “the biggest contributor to the state economy among all public universities.”

Cabrera noted other milestones for the past year, including the best fundraising year ever and having a stellar athletic year and research cycle, before moving onto items to look forward to this year.

“The new student center, together with the Exhibition Hall and the pavilion, will have a major impact on student life,” he said. Cabrera also mentioned the completion of the EcoCommons, a green space he recommends all members of the Tech community take time to enjoy.

He also emphasized how Tech is looking to increase the number of low-income students it recruits, and how the administration wants to institute more holistic support of students to improve their academic success and non-academic well-being.

Cabrera ended his formal address by praising the rebranding of Tech by consolidating the Institute’s many logos into a new, standardized one. He then showed a recent video showcasing the Invention Studio made by Institute Communications before answering questions submitted by the Tech community.

A recording of the entire address can be found on Tech’s YouTube channel and a transcript of Cabrera’s speech can be found online at president.gatech.edu.

This past week, the College of Computing had to postpone their Hall of Fame induction event once again.

However, they look forward to being able to induct the most recent classes in the coming year.

Like many other institutions, Tech’s College of Computing started honoring important alumni, faculty and others that have been influential in the field of information sciences inside and outside of Tech.

The College inducted Class Zero in 2018, but the past two classes have not been officially inducted due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s a way to acknowledge two classes of people,” said Ann Claycombe, director of communications for the College of Computing.

Claycombe said the first category is used for alumni who have “really made the most out of this education … holding [them] up as examples to our students.”

Claycombe gave examples of alumni who have graduated from the College of Computing and are now founders of billion dollar companies, and these alumni are also large supporters of the school as well.

This includes financial donations, but also advising the college and offering talks and guidance for current students.

“The other aspect is that we have … people who have taught here who have really played a defining role in creating the College of Computing as it exists today,” she said.

Examples of these inductees include Dorothy Crosland, the founder of information sciences at Tech, and Gus Baird, a prominent and popular professor in the college.

Claycombe summarized the Hall of Fame’s role as “a way of acknowledging our best and brightest, basically, both in terms of the folks who have made the college what it is, and the folks who’ve taken their education from the college to go on and do amazing things with it now.”

Although the induction event scheduled for last Friday was cancelled once again due to COVID-19, the third class of inductees still boasts amazing activities inside and outside of Tech.

One highlight of the inductees is Eugene Spafford, MS CS ‘81, Ph.D. CS ’86, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame as an exemplar of someone who has excelled after their time in the College of Computing. Spafford has worked in computing fields for over 40 years, and is an influential figure in cybersecurity.

He is currently a professor of computer science at Purdue University and was instrumental in establishing the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue.

The Hall of Fame also has a “rising star” category, which includes “the folks who are coming up” in the world of computer science, according the Claycombe.

Kathy Pham, CS ‘07 and MS CS ’09, is one of those young rising stars for the third group of inductees.

Pham has worked at Google, IBM, Harris Healthcare and was a founding member of the United States Digital Service at the White House.

She has also founded multiple non-profits which span many distinct fields.

Claycombe said that this year’s inductees were notified of the honor but will have to wait until a safer time to be recognized in person along with the 2020 class.

Until then, Claycombe encourages members of the Tech community to nominate others who they think readily embody the characteristics represented by the current inductees of the Computing Hall of Fame.

Tech is once again planning for an in-person, socially distanced commencement ceremony this spring and also intends to host a COVID-safe Ramblin’ On party in April.

Similar to last Dec., commencement will be hosted in Bobby Dodd Stadium so that graduates and guests can socially distance. The event will also be hosted over two days, with the Ph.D. and master’s ceremonies held on May 7, and the undergraduate ceremonies held the following day on May 8. There will be a morning and afternoon session for each day.

Guests are encouraged to come prepared for the Atlanta weather, as the event will happen outdoors rain or shine. In the December ceremonies, the drizzle did not impact the order of ceremonies, however some graduates expressed annoyance about having to sit in the rain for their turn to walk across the stage.

Many of the same COVID precautions will be exercised at the ceremonies as in Dec., such as mandatory face masks, six feet of social distancing between all attendees and limited touchpoints. There will be no student processional, and students will not shake hands with Institutional leadership or be hooded by their advisor during their walk. Graduates and guests attending the event are encouraged to get tested for COVID three days ahead of the ceremony.

All 2020 and 2021 graduates have the option to walk in this ceremony, or they can defer to the fall commencement ceremony. The normal RSVP period for the ceremony has closed, but students can currently submit a late RSVP request. Commencement will be outside in the open-air stadium and will occur rain or shine.

Since the commencement is split into four different ceremonies, the Institute has invited four different speakers to address the graduating class. PhD graduates will hear from Ryan Gravel, the founder of Sixpitch, a successful urban design and infrastructure firm. Later that afternoon, Stacey A. Dixon, deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will address the audience.

Undergraduate students in the morning will hear from Delta CEO Ed Bastian, while afternoon commencement attendees get to listen to Paul Judge, who co-founded TechSquare Labs and Pindrop.

Graduates are able to invite 5 guests to the ceremony to celebrate with them, who will be seated together in a pod to allow for social distancing. They can reserve guest mobile tickets by selecting a zone on the student athletics ticketing site. Seats are assigned on a first come, first serve basis, so students should check their emails to see instructions on how to claim a superior spot for their guests.

One change from recent commencements is the return of Ramblin’ On, the annual graduation party hosted by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. This event will also be altered to align with COVID safety rules and only offered to 2021 graduates.

“This year, we are limiting the number [of attendees] to just 1,600 graduating students and no guests,” said Savannah Lockman, student engagement coordinator for the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. “Masks will be required, and stadium staff will maintain social distancing,” she said.

Lockman also said students will walk through a one-way concourse during the event, first being allowed to take photos and then getting food before sitting down for a program and fireworks. There will be sanitizing stations and personal protective equipment (PPE) available throughout the event. The event was cancelled last spring because of the uncertainty around COVID near the beginning of the pandemic, according to Lockman.

“Now, we are following established guidelines from the Institute and CDC to make sure it meets their standards for a safe event,” Lockman said.
She said she hopes that the 2020 graduates were still able to get involved in the Alumni Association even though they missed out on their Ramblin’ On party. This year’s celebration is taking place on April 15 from 7-9 pm. All 2021 graduates, for both this semester and upcoming summer or fall, can now register for the event, but they must register before April 12 or whenever tickets sell out. Tickets are now $10 for all attendees.

At the event, attendees can enjoy free catered Chick-fil-A, games, photo opportunities with the Reck and even a fireworks display for “one helluva celebration.”

There will also be an information session on how to stay connected to Tech after commencement, given by President of the Alumni Association, Dean Sheheane.

With in-person commencement and the Ramblin’ On party, graduate activities are slowly moving back to pre-pandemic standards.

With Tech opting for fully in-person classes for the fall semester, fall commencement may resemble a much more normal ceremony than the past year has yielded.

Whether the fall graduation option will be held back in McCamish, as it has been in previous years, or not has not yet been announced. In the mean time, modified commencement continues.

Recently, a change to the lyrics of the Tech fight song was proposed by the school chairs to the faculty senate and executive board. This years-in-the-making proposal is now awaiting input from all members of the Tech community.

The proposed change surrounds the second verse of “The Ramblin’ Wreck” fight song, where the lyrics state “Oh! If I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold, And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold.”

The school chairs requested that the word “cheer” be replaced with “join” to better “honor and encourage women students,” according to their official request to the faculty executive board on Feb. 23.

Changing the lyrics to the fight song has had a long history at Tech, the most recent effort culminating in 2015. Martha Grover, ChBE professor, said she first got the idea for the change from fellow ChBE professor Ron Rousseau during a PhD commencement in 2008.

“I asked him what he thought of that passage, because it did not sound right to me. He suggested changing the word cheer to join,” Grover said about first considering the idea. In 2015, she helped to create jointhebraveandbold.gatech.edu to educate and gather input on the change.

The website featured a petition for people to sign in support, and soon after an opposition petition was created for those wanting to keep the current lyrics. It has amassed 2,572 supporters to date.

In 2015, SGA surveyed students and alumni on the proposed change. 68% of student respondents and 82% of alumni respondents voted to keep the current lyrics.

“I think the school chairs felt like this is one part of what we can do in terms of continuing to promote equity and inclusion on campus,” said David Sholl, School Chair for the ChBE Department, who presented the chairs’ request to the faculty executive board.

All school chairs back the lyric change, and the document was presented to both the faculty senate and executive board.

“We decided to present this idea to President Cabrera, and his very wise thinking on this was that he wanted to then get information and feedback from a wide array of different people on campus,” said Sholl.

As part of the initiative to survey many parts of the Tech community, SGA will hold a referendum on the issue during their upcoming election season. On March 10, an email was sent out to students explaining the upcoming referendum.

It explained the questions that will be on the referendum and stated, “Voting will take place from March 22-26 at elections.gatech.edu, so be sure to make your opinion heard!”

The email further explained that the referendum will not be the ultimate factor in deciding whether or not to change the lyrics, but will serve to gauge the student body’s general opinion.

Currently, SGA does not have an official stance on the issue, according to Undergraduate President Brielle Lonsberry.

Throughout the years there have been multiple proponents and opponents of the lyric change. One person that helped Grover develop the original website in 2015 was Robert Butera, EE ’91 and current EE and BMED professor. Butera published his opinions on the matter during their last effort as both an alumnus and current faculty member.

“I find this proposed change ideal in that it sends a clear message to the world of what GT is today, without wrecking anything about what GT has been,” Butera wrote on his lab site.

He also spoke on the impact of the minute change.

“While it is one word, the very act of changing it sends a strong positive message to the world and does nothing to compromise any of the great traditions of this school,” he said.

Others disagree with the change and see no problem with the current lyrics.

A recent thread on the Tech sports forum, Sting Talk, includes numerous opinions, mostly from Tech alumni, on the issue.

A user said, “So moron faculty members want to do this?” Another added “If it’s going to be changed, it should be the students and alumni deciding, not the faculty.”

The topic was also recently posted to the Tech subreddit, with many also disagreeing with the change. An anonymous user posted that “focusing on complete non-issues like this only serves to divide”, and “it’s kind of like crying wolf.”

Another pointed out that the lyrics also explicitly exclude non-engineers at Tech, which make up over half of the student body.

Changing one word to the Tech fight song has continually proven to be a complex issue. Members of the Tech community are able to weigh in on the change, with students getting the chance during the SGA referendum.

Sholl summed up that the best part of this issue was that “although we’re not to where we need to be, we’ve made a lot of progress” towards having women and men equally represented at Tech.

On Feb. 18, the world watched as NASA’s Perseverance Rover successfully landed on Mars, a mission made possible by a current Tech student.

Breanna Ivey, EE ’21, interned in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory last summer where she worked on the rover’s mobility team. Ivey’s job concerned ensuring the rover properly converted inputs to reach the correct destination on the red planet.

The Perseverance Rover is the fifth rover to be sent to Mars by NASA. The main goals of this rover’s stay is to better understand the geology of Mars and to look for former signs of life on the planet.

Perseverance will also collect rock and soil samples that could potentially be sent back to Earth in the future. The rover boasts improved navigability tools, which Ivey helped to test.

The Perseverance Rover is able to travel autonomously to a given destination on Mars. During her internship, Ivey’s job was to make sure the rover did the correct calculations to accurately reach that location.

She said this task required a lot of math, coding and simulations on her part to test the rover’s capabilities and get it ready for movement on Mars.

“It’s very surreal, and I don’t think I understood the impact of what I was doing while I was doing it,” Ivey said on her involvement in the project. “At the end, hopefully I contributed something, but watching the live landing and knowing I was a part, even if my role was small, of something like that is still surreal,” Ivey said about her work being on another planet.

Unfortunately, Ivey was not able to do anything special for the landing because of a test she had near Feb. 18, but she contacted her mentor about the event.

She also tuned into the live landing of the rover and was both excited and stressed about the event.

“The people in the control room were mainly listing off all the things that could go wrong,” Ivey said. “They didn’t start talking about the things that could go right until they already went right.”

Nevertheless, the rover persevered and landed successfully in Mars’ Jezero Crater.

In a similar way during her internship, Ivey persisted for her own success: participating on a project in an often white and male dominated field.

“When I was younger and I knew I wanted to build things, that’s all I knew. I didn’t know what that meant in terms of a job because I didn’t see anybody look like me doing the things that I thought were interesting,” Ivey said to 13WMAZ in July.

Recently, she expanded on how she has succeeded in STEM even without knowing many other Black women in these fields.

“It’s difficult to be in STEM in general, but being a woman and being a black woman adds extra layers of obstacles,” Ivey said.

“Throughout my journey at Tech, I have learned (and am still learning) to speak up and be myself, fully in academic spaces,” Ivey said.

She hopes her story can inspire other Black and brown girls to follow their dreams and know they belong in STEM fields, according to 13WMAZ.

With her NASA internship under her belt, Ivey is looking forward to an internship this summer in the healthcare device field but says she would not mind going back to the Jet Propulsion Lab and the amazing experience she had there.

“I’m interested in trying out a few different things before I set my mind on one path,” Ivey said.

Ivey is set to graduate from the Institute next fall with a bachelors of science degree in electrical engineering.

She looks forward to whatever experiences follow her astronomical contributions.

Last month, part of the Tech student body was flattered upon receiving an email from the National Society of Leadership and Success recruiting them to join their organization.

However, the solicitation of students’ emails was at random and under the false pretense that the selected students were chosen off of an academic basis.

The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) is “the largest collegiate leadership honor society in the United States,” according to their recruiting material and reportedly boasts over a million members nationwide.

The NSLS recruits students similarly to other high school and collegiate honor societies.

They often invite top students to join over email, as do many other honor societies.

But, due to a condition in Tech’s open records request system, the society was only given access to students’ emails without their academic information attached, leading to invitations being sent to random Tech students.

“We did get some emails about parents and students reaching out saying that they had gotten the communication from the National Society of Leadership and Success,” said Gerome Stephens, associate dean of students and director of the Center for Student Engagement at Tech. “What I also knew was that we hadn’t shared any information with them.”

The Center for Student Engagement has not shared student information with the organization.

The organization definitely did not have academic information about students.

Stephens reached out to the organization to ask how NSLS acquired the emails of Tech students.

“What I found out was that they got the contact information for students through an open records request that was very specific,” Stephens said.

The invitations from the NSLS went out to around 11,000 students, and “it was kind of a random selection of the 11,000 students,” Stephens said.

He added that there were no academic qualifications associated with the selected students, even though the NSLS invitations implied the students were high performers at Tech.

After this discovery, the dean’s office has responded to student inquiries to explain that the invitations were under false pretenses and were not legitimate.

An update about the situation was also sent out in a Weekly Digest email and commented on a post about the invitations on the Tech Reddit page.

Stephens also added that there are active chapters of NSLS around the country that are good, but the email solicitation was “not an ethical way of recruiting.”

When he reached out to the NSLS about the random selection of students, the contact apologized for the actions and stressed that the email solicitation was not usually how they worked.

“There’s a business side to the organization; it doesn’t make the whole organization bad,” Stephens said.

“I think it was a business decision that they regret, and they’ve apologized over and over.”

As emails like this get sent out often to the student body, Tech students should stay vigilant when approached in the future.

“My guidance would be if they’re asking for money and not offering an organizational-type experience, I would question it,” Stephens said about dealing with similar societies that seem to randomly recruit students.

Researching whether your school has a chapter of the recruiting society is a good indicator of whether or not you should join. NSLS does not have an active chapter on Tech’s campus. One should also check what kind of requirements and fees are required to join the organization to make sure it is legitimate.

In late January, Tech and Emory jointly hosted a virtual hackathon to bring students together to design technological solutions to make returning to work and school settings during COVID-19 easier and safer.

A hackathon is a design race-like event where students come together to tackle different problems by developing software.

Tech’s Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and CREATE-X program collaborated with the Emory Global Health Institute and University School of Medicine to host such an event from Jan. 22-24, where students were challenged to come up with solutions for returning to work and school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was originally going to be an in-person event this past fall, and we were going to tackle some of our global health issues on our end,” said Keriann Roy, operations and evaluation manager at the Emory Global Health Institute.

“Then COVID hit, and suddenly we were at home, and someone was like ‘What if we did it on COVID?’ and we switched gears,” Roy said.

She stressed that the event was chiefly a chance for the two Atlanta schools to collaborate and combine some of the main focuses of their curriculums. This also led to a rule of the event where each team had to include both Emory and Tech students. The ongoing circumstances of the pandemic supplied the theme of the event as schools and businesses everywhere struggle to find ways to return to in-person gatherings safely.

Each of the 29 teams in the competition pitched their project to a panel of the judges composed of experts in public health, business, technology and operations.

These included people from Emory, Tech and outside companies who were interested in the solutions offered by the hackathon.

After the initial round of judging, 10 finalist teams were selected, securing a $1,500 prize at least, and were then judged in a final round to determine the winners.

The winning team of the hackathon, Rotations, saw the hackathon as “the perfect opportunity to conceptualize and model ideas backed by research that could help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” said Arvin Poddar, third-year CS, one of the students who worked on the project.

He was joined by Ryan Cobelli, third-year CS, and Merissa Coleman, third-year human health major from Emory, on the project.

“Having an Emory student and two Georgia Tech students enabled us to conceptualize strong tools that maximize public health goals and to create software that allowed us to put our ideas into action,” Poddar said. Both Roy and Poddar mentioned how students could draw from their own personal experiences with social distanced school to inspire the creation of their products.

“As students, we are concerned about our health by the prospect of returning to in-person facilities, which led us to brainstorm our own personal ideas that would help us to feel safe,” said Poddar about why his team decided to participate in the hackathon and where they got the idea for Rotations. Poddar added “the hackathon allowed us to more fully flesh-out our ideas in a careful and thoughtful manner with science and consumer-usage in mind.”

The team created a platform to plan safe room layouts for schools and businesses returning to in-person meetings and utilized cutting edge research on the virus to inform their software.

As the winning team, the students received a $3,500 prize and will be enrolled in CREATE-X’s launch program this summer to turn their project into a startup.

The hackathon produced many other innovative projects. The second place team, COVERED, designed a portable wallet to store and keep masks sanitary.

The third place team, nonose, created a comfortable mask that discourages improper mask wearing. Both of these teams received a $3,500 prize as well.

The products created during the hackathon included software, devices and other projects all designed at aiding the eventual return to in-person events during this pandemic.

“It’s going to take a while before we actually get back to normal,” Roy said. Roy especially thinks Rotations will help people in a less COVID-strict world to still maintain some caution before resuming a completely normal life.

Although the hackathon was restricted to virtual means, the teams in the competition came up with many ideas to help facilitate a safe return to in-person gatherings.

As Roy summed up, the different perspectives brought together by the two schools’ collaboration “gave a different lens” to the competition, allowing for the creation of many multidisciplinary solutions to our present-day issues.

At my first meeting for my English class here at Tech, I realized something was very different from my English classes in high school. It wasn’t the weird course theme or even the awkward social distanced meeting, but it was that it seemed like all of my classmates didn’t care about learning anything in the class.

Everyone has a class they wish they didn’t have to take, but everyone I talked to in that class corroborated the statement that kept crossing my mind: no one here wants to learn anything in the humanities. Beyond that small group of people, this truth was reinforced with every engineering student I met. Basically, Tech students in STEM don’t care about the humanities.

I don’t mean to sound like some uppity book snob, but I think the Institute and its students are both so flippant towards the humanities they are hurting the effectiveness of their future STEM professionals.

For starters, if Tech didn’t have a humanities requirement most students would completely stop learning about them after high school. Even the humanities professors know how much Tech students abhor fulfilling the credit, with each of my Spanish teachers opening the class with “How many of you are just using this for an easy humanities credit?”

The American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) recommends that engineering students receive an education incorporating the humanities and actually learn from those classes. STEM courses tend to focus on cold, analytical knowledge, but humanities are instead interested in people and their connections to the world around them.

The ASEE calls out engineers for lacking communication and interpersonal skills and advises that thorough instruction in the humanities can fill this gap in many engineers’ skill sets. No company is looking for a solitary know-it-all, they want a know-it-all capable of working with others to create the best product or services possible.

Besides rounding out a resume, the humanities should be embraced as a break from the constancy of STEM coursework. My favorite day of the week is Wednesday, precisely because that’s when my English and Spanish classes meet, and I get some relief from the calculus and biomedical engineering that dominate the rest of my week. A busy STEM student may see the humanities as a distraction from their “real” work, but the broad expanse of the humanities offers a world for students to explore beyond their specialized interests.

Tech knows its status as an engineering school, but that doesn’t excuse the Institute from providing a comprehensive and serious humanities education. The skills learned in humanities courses would benefit the Institute as well as its students. The focus on written and oral communication in the humanities would bolster students’ performance in other classes and increase the worldview of its often narrow-sighted students.

I don’t expect my STEM classmates to become scholars in Shakespeare or deep-thinking philosophers, but I hope as I go through my time at Tech I see students gratefully taking breaks from their normal coursework. From reading “The Bell Jar” for fun, considering the historical context of Clueless, or examining the social implications of a J. Cole album, there are ways for STEM students to indulge in the humanities while still enjoying their time. Being a pioneering figure in your field of study is great and all but being an engineer who knows how to read is even cooler.