As tables around Mustang Way began to set up for the Centers and Institutes Fair on Jan. 17, at 11:45 p.m., students and faculty around campus slowly trickled their way to booths that caught their interest.
Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Bridget Benson organized the fair and wanted to find a way to bring together some overlooked programs that students, staff and faculty could get involved more in.
“When I started here, I wasn’t even aware these [programs] existed,” Benson said. “These are project opportunities that people across the university could get involved in and create some sort of cross collaborations.”
The fair is part of the Poly Connections program, which was created by Benson to connect all faculty and students to resources and spaces on campus they might now have known about.
According to College of Engineering website, early 20 facilities participated in the event with booths ranging from many different types of colleges including the Center for Coastal Marine Sciences, Center for Expressive Technologies, Wildland-Urban Fire Institute, Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub, the Strawberry Center and Poly Global Automatic Identification Technologies (GAIT), to name a few.
The event ran from 12-2 p.m. and gave programs the chance to show off what their work to try and attract more interest to students and faculty who might not have heard of them.
Tali Freed is in her 20th year of running Poly GAIT, a research and development center for radio frequency identification, was tabling the fair and was very passionate about getting more students involved in not only her program but many others as well.
“It’s not enough for some students to [just] go to classes,” Freed said. “They need to be doing something that’s meaningful and engaging to them.”
Computer engineering freshman Enzo Roberto was introduced to Poly GAIT on a student tour of the campus before he committed to Cal Poly.
“I was really interested so [Tali] invited my mom and I up to the [Radio Frequency Identification] labs,” Roberto said. “If this is a school where I can just talk to a [professor] and get to work on some cool projects, then this is where I want to go.”
Plant sciences graduate student Cooper Calvin was involved with the Cal Poly Strawberry Center where they are celebrating 10 years of strawberry research.
“I think it’s really important to let students know they can get really good hands on learning,” Calvin said. “A lot of the work we do here is directly applicable to careers later down the road.”
Benson is planning to have at least two more events like this during the spring quarter in the University Union and North Mountain area.
“I think students are always looking for ways to see the applicability of their studies in real world projects,” Benson said. “So these are some great research opportunities.”
