Stevens Institute of Technology: Admissions Blog

Welcome Stevens Class of 2015

First Days on Campus: Sunny with a Chance of Fun... Despite Irene!

Stevens is excited to welcome its largest group of incoming freshmen ever, as members of the Class of 2015 officially begin classes this week.  

New students had much to see and do in their first days as Ducks. Undergraduate Orientation kicked off Wednesday, August 24, and those who participated in Pre-Orientation activities arrived the previous weekend for exciting activities included in the Outdoor Adventure, City Life, Sports and Fitness, and Performing Arts experiences that Stevens offers.

Orientation included a jam-packed schedule of events - the family BBQ and information fair, President's dinner, Freshmen Summer Games, and Stevens Luau were highlights among an exciting lineup of celebrations.     

 Hurricane Irene proved a slight challenge, but, on the flip side, the storm created a unique opportunity for new students to get a more immediate sense of the welcoming and socially conscious culture at Stevens. 

In the early morning of Saturday, August 27, the day of the storm's expected arrival - and four days into Student Orientation - over two dozen freshmen and their orientation leaders chipped in to help the mayor of Hoboken, Dawn Zimmer, and Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members distribute critical information about evacuation and preparedness to city residents.

"We initially expected to be making calls from City Hall, but, instead, we set out on foot. We were given fliers in English and Spanish of the precautions everyone in Hoboken was to take during the storm," said Juliet Turalski, Stevens student and Orientation Leader.  "Those living in the basement of an apartment building had a mandatory evacuation notice, and all others who chose to stay in Hoboken during the storm had to be notified about how severe the storm was going to be and what they needed to do to prepare. It was tiring, and every volunteer stayed in it - doing the job without complaint. In my eyes, that showed a lot of integrity. It was a community service not many would do in such a critical time. I know Stevens students made a difference in Hoboken that day."

Originally designed as a park, waterfront, and community center painting and cleanup event (a new community service component of Student Orientation), Saturday morning's activity was modified to provide critical assistance to the city during the crisis. "The experience showed me how Hoboken, despite being a major city, is still a close-knit community where people look out for each other," said Robert Hale, incoming civil engineering student and one of the community service volunteers. "I don't feel like an interloper. I feel like a Hoboken resident."

Robert is one of 620 incoming students selected from more than 4,000 applicants this spring. These exceptional students not only make up the largest class, they enter Stevens as the most competitive and selective class in the University's history.  They will all soon learn that collaboration and benevolence are simply part of the mix here at Stevens.  

As always, Stevens' returning students played a significant role in welcoming the incoming class with open arms, cheers, and an outpouring of guidance and support. "Everyone here has been nice, and I've felt very welcome," said Terrance White, a freshman from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. "It's so comfortable and peaceful, which is especially remarkable with New York City only steps away."

Alumna Mary Kelly Reflects on Experience in Haiti

When alumna Mary Kelly graduated in 2009, she launched from Stevens with more than an engineering management degree and a full-time position at the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey.  In her time at Stevens, she also developed a strong sense of community and a desire to help others, qualities that proved particularly valuable in a situation she could have never imagined and in a place far removed from her life in New Jersey.

For nearly a month, Mary volunteered in the relief efforts post last year’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti.  And in that time, she unwittingly put her engineering skills and compassion to the test, experiencing the tedious, hard work of clearing crumbled homes and schools, organizing medical relief at a hospital encampment and witnessing the resilience of a people she would have never known.

On the anniversary of this catastrophic event, Mary recounted with our staff some of the details from her days in an area in Haiti where 90% of the buildings were damaged, no government infrastructure remained, and the death toll reached between 20,000 to 30,000, according to a United Nations assessment, she reported. 

After the earthquake, Mary said it didn’t take much deliberation on her end to decide to request vacation time at work, purchase a plane ticket and connect with the non-profit group, Hands On Disaster Relief (now All Hands).   Soon after making the arrangements, she was on her way to Léogâne, a coastal Haitian city about 18 miles west of Port-Au-Prince (the epicenter of the earthquake), and one that Mary refers to as the shattered city by the sea.

“I realized that not only did I want to go, but I could.  I’m in good health, single, no children, and have the privilege of a job with vacation time,” she said. “All Hands had helped in other natural disasters, and the earthquake relief in Haiti was their biggest project. I was eager to be part of that.”  

LESSONS LEARNED

As a volunteer, Mary gave her time and energy, at times risking her own safety and comfort, coping with, for example, the aftershocks and smaller-scale earthquakes that continued to shake the area.  But she said she also received a great deal.  For one, she learned some vital lessons about life in an earthquake-torn region, some of which are expressed in the journal she shared:

 “Lesson One: Haitian patience. Upon our arrival, it was clear that patience was everything. It started with digging through two flights worth of luggage for our bags because there was no power for conveyor belts at the airport. But of course that expanded to wondering how we could help such a destroyed city in such a short amount of time. Yet after a few days removing rubble, it was clear that progress could be made, just at a much slower pace than we could have imagined. It seemed that by sheer force of will, among a street of collapsed houses, one would get cleared out and a little shelter would go up. Then shortly after, another, and so on. One wheelbarrow load at a time was slowly clearing Léogâne of rubble and giving families a place to begin building new lives.

Lesson Two: How to ‘Rubble’. ‘Rubbling’ entailed spending most of our time sledge-hammering broken schools and homes into bits small enough to shovel into wheelbarrows and then dragging them out to the street where we either crushed down the rubble to fix the roads or piled for the government workers to haul off in bigger dump trucks. My first rubbling assignment was at Pyramid School. Armed with shovels, wheelbarrows, sledge hammers and pickaxes, we would be greeted every morning without fail by the smiles and laughter of many of the children that attend the school. They worked side-by-side with us all day, every day we were there. I was even taught how to sledge-hammer by a nine-year-old boy named Orlando. After almost a week of back-breaking work, we were able to make the school safe and ready for classes to start. I don’t think I’ve ever seen kids so excited to go back to school.”

LITTLE BY LITTLE

Mary also recalled a day she was directed to help a woman whose family home – which had been steadily built and preserved over eight generations – had crumbled to ruins in the quake.  After hours and hours of rubbling, Mary asked the woman how she copes. “Knowing how long it had taken her family to build this big, beautiful home, I asked her, ‘How do you do this day after day without falling apart?  I don’t know if I could handle it like you are.’ And her answer said so much about her and maybe even the people of Haiti as a whole. She expressed to me a Creole saying, which in English translates: Little by little, the bird builds its nest,” recounted Mary. “Her answer said a lot about resilience, and it’s a something I’ll never forget.” 

All purpose and all encompassing, Mary said her work in Léogâne was simply about contributing all that she could. In addition to rubbling, she worked at a field hospital stepping in wherever needed.  In this capacity, she also used her engineering skills to develop a system for managing the hospital’s inventory, something she noticed didn’t exist, and a solution that was well-received, she said. 

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Realizing the privileges that awaited her back in the U.S., she even accelerated her efforts in the end. “Up to my last days there, I had at least been somewhat cautious and careful with my body to prevent injuries or illness.  But in the final stretch, I totally pushed myself,” she said.  “I thought, ‘I need to put in my all. Anything bad that might happen to my body, America can fix it.  I gave away my boots and some other things.  I even lost my camera somewhere along the way.  Those things seemed insignificant after experiencing what people can and do live without.”

 

 

 

 

 

Stevens Habitat for Humanity Chapter Visits Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in Timber Lake, SD

By Sara Roeder, Class of 2008

Mitakuye oyas’in! This phrase, meaning “all my relatives” in the native Lakota language of the Sioux Native Americans, became the theme of the Stevens Institute of Technology team’s trip to Timber Lake, South Dakota for Habitat for Humanity.  With these words, the Lakota culture attempts to communicate the belief that all life is connected, and there was no better premise to observe this cultural philosophy than from the perspective of a Collegiate Challenge.

The Collegiate Challenge is an alternative spring break program sponsored by Habitat for Humanity during which students spend a week building a house for a partnership affiliate.  The Stevens Institute of Technology team trekked to the Okiciyapi Tipi HFH affiliate on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in Timber Lake.  Upon landing in the Midwest, the general sentiment was that the group had arrived in a foreign country, one in which the predictable, geometric patterns created by innumerable skyscrapers were replaced by expansive vistas of rolling prairie and irregular rocky buttes.

As the team pulled in to our final destination at the Holy Cross Catholic School, we were greeted warmly by Sisters Pegge Boehm and Darlene Gutenkauf with their arms full of an extensive array of bar cookies: brownies, blondies, pumpkin bars, spice cake, and more.  The hospitality did not end there, as the team enjoyed several home-cooked meals throughout the week.  The accommodations at Holy Cross were simply the start of the progression to a new understanding of the word ‘community’.

With bellies full and bodies rested, the team embarked on their true mission for the week: building a house for a Timber Lake family.  The Marshalls are a family of five that have fallen on hard times, and have turned to Habitat for Humanity for a hand up.  The building site was seven miles away on a gravel road in a desolate town known as Glencross.  On Monday, the team was faced with the challenge of erecting an enclosed house on what appeared to be little more than foundation and decking.  During the week, the team fought through blisters, splinters, wind, snow, and precarious ladder maneuvers in order build exterior walls, interior framing, and complete a roof for the Marshalls.

Although the work was tough, the team thoroughly enjoyed the time under the tutelage of construction superintendent a.k.a. crew boss Ted “Teddy” Eagle (the added help of Adam Westbrook and Allison Moe, two Habitat veterans in town for a few days, also sped up the construction process).  The camaraderie experienced at the site contributed to the group’s increasing awareness of the importance of human relationships in both rural and urban societies.  This importance, and relevance, of human connections also carried over into the Native American cultural activities planned by the Okiciyapi Tipi HFH affiliate.

While on the reservation, the Stevens team participated in a native sweat lodge ceremony, listened to live performances of traditional Sioux folksongs and legends, and also ate the local delicacy: “Indian tacos”.  By far, the most intense cultural experience the team partook in was the sweat lodge.  All 15 team members entered into a deer hide tent constructed with willows that stood approximately four feet tall with a diameter of twelve feet.  In the center of this tent lay several igneous rocks that had been heating in a blazing fire for most of the day.  The sweat lodge leader would pour water over the rocks during the ceremony to create steam which would in turn heat the participants.  The team then endured four rounds of sweating throughout which the sweat lodge leader chanted Lakota songs and prayers.  While the team did not directly understand the meaning of the words being spoken, communication and intercultural connections were deepened as a result of the sharing of this ceremony.

Another favorite activity of the Stevens group was a trip out to the ranch of the head of the affiliate, Jerry Farlee.  At present, he maintains cattle and bison on the ranch.  The excursion was taken on a truly picturesque day, and several team members will have photographs to treasure the landscapes.  Throughout the tour, Farlee stressed the Sioux reliance on subsistence living.  This event demonstrated the connection that humans have to the land, and also showed how delicate of a connection it is when facing the advance of an increasingly modern world.

As the Stevens students return to Hoboken, New Jersey, many of them have taken on new perspectives as a direct result of their experiences in the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation and, more specifically, the Timber Lake community.  The students approached this alternative spring break with open minds and open hearts, and have broadened their perception of community beyond the simply cordial to the nearly familial.  As a group, we would like to say thank you, mitakuye oyas’in, for all that you have shared.