st udent c h a p te r n ews University of Alberta The new ITE executive members at the University of Alberta Student Chapter have been elected virtually through an online meeting on October 9th, 2020. The new team is very cooperative and seeks to hold new events that encourage undergraduate and graduate students to engage with transportation engineers in different virtual ways. Due to the pandemic, it may not be possible to arrange in-person events and meetups anytime soon. However, the team will do their best to arrange some exciting events, mentorship programs, competitions online and engage more students. The members are: • • • • • •
Presentation Competition
President: David Mason Vice-President: Davesh Sharma Treasurer: Samaa Agina Secretary: Sabrina Rashid Sheonty Marketing Specialist: Tasnia Nowrin Event Co-ordinator: Terrance Tao
Talk to Your Alumni Event Our first online event was held on Dec. 17th, 2020. We invited our alumni Gabrielle Paquin and Meghana Valupadas to share their industry experiences with current students and answer questions about jobsearch, in-demand skills, challenges, and opportunities from the audience. To thank their participation, door prizes were issued for the speakers and three randomly chosen participants. This event will be held frequently during the winter, spring and summer time. Social Drop-in and Online Game Event The pandemic has greatly impacted the social life of all UofA students and limited the opportunity to connect with other fellow transportation students. This event brought the opportunity to interact with other members of ITEUA. On January 15th, 2021, we had a great social drop-in event where the attendees felt grateful to see and talk again with their colleagues. This is going to be a frequent event where the students can get back together to connect and have warm chat and some fun. We anticipate evolving this into an online game event for students to interact with prizes for the various winners as well.
43 TRANSPORTATION TALK | WINTER 2020-2021
Attendees and participants at the U of A Student Chapter’s virtual Talk to Your Alumni event Our first major event of the season is the presentation competition. This is a time for the undergraduate and graduate students to show their presentation skills for various interesting transportation topics. The ITEUA issued cash prizes ($700) for graduate and undergraduate students thanks to our event sponsor, NACITE. Many students were interested and submitted their abstracts, from which we chose the most interesting ten topics to be in the competition. The cash prizes for the winners were mailed to their home. Undergraduate Representative In order to engage more undergraduate students in our events, we have selected a motivated undergraduate representative. The main duties of the representative are to promote events, gather ideas and suggestions from undergraduate students and generally increase the inclusion of this demographic.
