We didn’t have to be at the first conference session until
10:30 AM, so we were able to sleep in an extra hour. In my case I decided the
best course of action was to play Contagion with Tomko and Cara until 1:10 AM.
It was not the best decision for sleep, but definitely the best for fun. Man! I
have missed playing KF and contagion with them! It was so much fun as we were
all terrible at extracting survivors from the houses as zombies were pouring
in. As for me personally I was running around the house with a nailgun boarding
up windows. It was a blast! Anyways I had a good breakfast at 9:30 AM (cereal
and two slices of bread) and then Shoop and I met Stefan and Nick and walked to
the riverside arena where the event was happening today. It was a short walk
and it luckily wasn’t dumping rain yet. The weather here is very British as it
drizzles or rains most days, which is a huge bummer for outdoor skating as I
want to go so badly…maybe I’ll skate in the dorm (like in East)…It is also
maybe like mid 50s or low 60s most days so not quite the sun and beach weather
like back home (or Oregon’s beautiful 70 degrees and no humidity). At any rate
we arrived at the conference and found we were broken up between 3 different
tables. I was at my own table with Professor Ruiz and about 4 other people
unknown to me. The conference in the morning was supposed to be a
mini-intro/lecture on the sustainability efforts of the University of Worcester
and the new elective they have on this topic. As a random note I accidently
made a double shot of tea (as I chose a tea bag and still poured in more tea). It
was decently interesting and described how the elective is a mixture of
lectures and group project work to emphasize the real world nature of the
field. It has experienced quite a bit of success actually and the program today
was designed to tell others about their success to start other programs
elsewhere. Nick asked a question about direct feedback and how this had been
involved in the program. I asked about where they saw the program in 5 or 10
years and how they wanted to improve it. Both of which had good answers. After
the first lecture it was lunch at 12:40 PM (One ironic thing is that the main
leader for the event said there were University of Minnesota students instead
of WPI students there (awkward)). Lunch was actually really good. The different
serving dishes of food were laid out in a buffet style with slices of cheese to
quiches to couscous to salmon, potatoes and green beans to rolls to salads to
ham. It was actually quite good and I ended up eating two plates of the food
(the salmon was not as good as the salmon I cooked from last night). I dare say
I was the only one who had two plates of food. No regrets! It means that I can
eat a light dinner and save money! After food we were moved over to hang with
the Energize Worcester students and had probably between 50 and 75 photos taken
(seemed endless) of us by the various camera totting attendees. We were in our
obnoxious orange t-shirts from the program to support them as we are only on
the very front end of the extension of their original work.
After a good number of photos we met the VIP of the day, a
guy named Steve E. from the higher education funding council of England (HEFCE)
who made the allocation of 5 million pounds of government money to support
sustainability initiatives (and awarded the Energize Worcester project over
100,000 pounds). So he was a pretty big deal. After photos and Steve we walked
downstairs and piled into the same mini-bus to go to a student property to tell
Steve about sustainability. Correction the Energize Worcester peeps went inside
and Team CANS (us 4 from WPI) were left outside in the van. We knew this was
going to happen as we already have a good idea of the student accommodations
and the information the Energize folks would present. Also the home was really
tiny. So we stayed outside as a team in the bus and chatted about American
stuff and the project. After about 20 minutes the VIP and several others
(including Professor Ruiz) came back and we vanned back to the University and
went inside the Pierson building to a first floor conference room. We then
proceeded to have cookies and spring water inside while Peng gave a brief
overview of the Energize Worcester site and the app in the website to compare
energy bills. After this it was go time. We had to present our PowerPoint on
our project to the VIP, Professor Ruiz, Peng, Katy, another publicity person
and another guy wearing a suit, who turned out to be the provost of students
and another higher up for the university named Ryan. We had this as yesterday
we had crafted our PowerPoint to include our updates on progress (EPCs and
averages, leaflets, surveys, letters, council permission etc). We had practiced
it twice (although it was for all intents and purposes the same as the final
PowerPoint from ID2050) and we absolutely killed it today! It ran a bit longer
than we wanted but we had a full half hour for that and Q&A so it didn’t
matter. After we finished the presentation the VIP said it was a really
professional presentation and that he was quite impressed. BAM! WPI setting the
bar for presentations! (It was ironic because this morning one of the
presenters had a really futzed up PowerPoint where all the text had been
shifted around on the slide and the images obscured so much of it. It was
scary). Anyways we fielded a whole host of questions from the VIP such as data
security and smart meters, the purpose of the project, the scope of the
project, future work and the like. After this Q&A we chatted a bit with
both the VIP and the provost before they left with Katy and Peng. We then had a
meeting with Ruiz and she really congratulated us on our presentation and
answering of questions. She then dropped a bomb on us about our writing saying
it was not up to the level of the rest of our project work. It is very true
though. We are still working on the writing and she gave us a number of tips
and sets of feedback on our survey and introduction and methodology. After such
raving reviews of our work today it was kind of a buzzkill, but the feedback is
only for the best so I am really happy she and Professor Shockey spend so much
time with us! After this Professor Ruiz headed back to the train station and
our team dispersed. Shoop went to the shops downtown and Nick and Stefan went
to chill. I went back to grab a nap (after eating an obscene amount of those
good cookies from the presentation room) and ended up sleeping for about an
hour and a half in 30 minute increments. I’m still tired though, but I think it
has to do with catching up on sleep from those incredibly late nights in the
past week. It’s also crummy weather so I
don’t feel terrible about it. I haven’t had dinner yet but it will most likely
be something small as lunch was huge.
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