Student Activities

Student Essay Competition

Cash prizes for the 2009 Earthzine Student Essay Contest

Earthzine invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit an essay for the 2009 Student Essay Competition: Sustainability through Earth Observation and Engineering. Earthzine, an online environmental journal, is encouraging students to creatively examine the benefits that new technological systems in Earth observation and engineering can have on sustainability.

Students should submit essays by October 17 that follow one of the two dominant themes in sustainability: social equity and environmental protection. Essays should also be related to one or more of Earthzine's focal topics.

Finalists will lead a blog about their essay and participate in blogs of competing essays. Winners will be determined based on the quality of the essay and the quality of the blog. Prizes sponsored by the IEEE Foundation are: first place ($500), second place ($250), and third place ($150).

Queries and final essays should be sent to David Mullins, Ph.D., Associate Education Editor, at any time (dmullins@sf.edu). The deadline for submission is October 17, 2009. Blogging will occur November 15-December 15. Winners will be announced on Earthzine on December 21. Check for more information on Earthzine.

Video Competition

NEWS from IEEE-USA
2001 L Street, N.W., Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036-4910

$5,000 in Scholarship Awards to Be Presented in 2009-10 IEEE-USA Online Engineering Video Competition on 'How Engineers Make a World of Difference'

WASHINGTON (17 September 2009) -- IEEE-USA is launching the organization's third online engineering video competition for undergraduate students on "How Engineers Make a World of Difference." IEEE-USA will present four scholarship awards totaling $5,000 to undergraduates who create the most effective 90-second video clips reinforcing for an 11-to-13-year-old audience how engineers improve the world. Entries must be submitted through YouTube by midnight Eastern Time on Friday, 15 January 2010. Winning entries will be announced and shown during Engineers Week, 14-20 February 2010.

Entries in the 2009-10 competition should provide an individual profile of an engineer and how he or she makes "a world of difference." Entries will be judged on their effectiveness in reaching the target audience by portraying engineers as "real people" who seek to make life better, as well as on their originality, creativity and entertainment value.

First prize is: $2,000, second prize, $1,500, and third prize, $1,000. The first-place winner will also receive up to $1,000 to cover travel expenses to receive his/her award at the IEEE-USA Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tenn., on 6 March 2010.

Further, a special award for $500 will be presented for the most innovative and effective showing of a video entry to a "tweener" target audience. This could involve presenting the video entered in the competition at a university engineering expo for K-12 students, in a middle school classroom, with a scout group, or in another setting with 11-to-13-year-olds.

For the first time, the video competition is open to all U.S. undergraduate students regardless of academic discipline. However, at least one undergraduate participant must be an IEEE student member. For the third consecutive year, the competition will be judged by two engineering graduate Ph.D. students, Andrew Quecan and Suzette Aguilar, and by Nate Ball, engineer-host for PBS' "Design Squad."

For more information on how to enter the IEEE-USA Online Engineering Video Scholarship Competition and to upload an entry on YouTube, visit http://www.ieeeusa.org/communications/video_competition.

Information on how to become an IEEE student member is available at http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/join/join.html.

IEEE-USA advances the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of more than 210,000 engineers, scientists and allied professionals who are U.S. members of IEEE. IEEE-USA is part of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional society with 375,000 members in 160 countries. See http://www.ieeeusa.org.

Contact: Pender M. McCarter
Senior Public Relations Counselor, IEEE-USA
Phone: 1 202 530 8353
E-mail: p.mccarter@ieee.org