November 8, 2024

C2SMARTER is honored to have celebrated STEM Day with Bard High School Early College Bronx and ITE Met Section for the second year in a row.

Festivities kicked off with opening remarks from Carl Vincent Manalo, the Superintendent of Bronx HS Districts 7, 9 & 12, which includes Bard.

Mr. Manalo spoke of his personal connection to promoting STEM interests among high schoolers, as well as the potential benefits that a future in STEM, could reap, both educationally and professionally.

Next was an interactive roundtable of transportation engineers, spearheaded by ITE Met Section President Asheque Rahman and moderated by Treasurer Elaine Du, PE.

The panel featured a wide range of transportation professionals, from those who only began their careers in recent months to retirees of 30+ years of experience. The panel relayed their own STEM journeys, from their educational background to career development, and fielded questions from the students.

Big thanks to this year’s panelists: Steven Luglio Minah Ali, Jack Gazard, Camerin Spahn-Schindele, P.E., and Gus Da Silva. Their insights and passion were invaluable and provided great context to students who could follow in their footsteps in coming years.

After lunch, students got to sample different aspects of transportation engineering for themselves with the help of NYU Student Researchers Shuo Zhang and Dachuan Zuo.

Wearing Virtual Reality headsets, Shuo showed the high schoolers how to create and experience their own VR work zones.

With the help of Dachuan and NYU postdoc Fan Zuo, students also learned about Computer Vision technologies by interacting with the sensors and cameras in the C2SMART Lab.

See more pictures from the day here: