11/06/2020
This year we celebrated our student chapters with the 25th anniversary of our annual student symposium. Due to COVID-19 we held it online via Zoom. It was a great success!! Read more below and check out our photo album!
For 25 years, the Baltimore-Washington Chapter of SAMPE has hosted an annual student symposium where students from affiliated student chapters present their research. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the student symposium continued for its 25th year and was held virtually via Zoom on April 21st, 2020. The virtual symposium followed a similar format as the in-person symposium, where students from each participating student chapters -- University of Delaware, University of Maryland - College Park, University of Maryland - Baltimore County, and West Virginia University -- gave poster and podium presentations.
After welcoming remarks by B/W Chapter Chairman, Richard Pemberton, and B/W Chapter Vice Chair-Student affairs, Erik Thostenson, participants were split into breakout rooms to present their posters. The breakout rooms allowed for informal discussion and questions between the students and SAMPE members. Judges and symposium participants were placed in each breakout room and every 15 minutes the presenters were rotated between rooms, allowing the students to present their research to all SAMPE members and judges. Instead of normal paper posters, the students created a PDF of their posters, which allowed them to zoom in and move around the poster during their presentation and discussion. Judges completed their evaluations via a Google form and convened to deliberate in a separate breakout room during a short break between the poster and podium presentations. During this time, participants were allowed to join the other breakout rooms for continued networking and discussion. After the poster judging was complete, the breakout rooms were closed, and everyone joined to listen to the podium presentations. Students shared their screens and presented their slides "webinar style" with time for audience questions at the end of the presentation.
"The student symposium is one of the highlights of the year for our chapter, and we wanted to keep the tradition going and give students the opportunity to present their research and network with SAMPE members," said Thostenson. "The response was terrific. We had over 50 registered and over 40 participants throughout the night. The online format allowed us to have judges from across the country and included members from industry, government and academia. Fifteen members volunteered to judge the poster or podium presentations."
At the end of the night, the poster and podium winners were announced. All students were participating to receive cash prizes, and the winner of the podium presentation is automatically a finalist to present their research at the SAMPE North America student symposium at CAMX and the poster presenter is automatically a semi-finalist.
