Outreach - An Introduction to Outreach for Fall 2020

17 Sep 2020

Hey everyone! My name is Rosanna Rincon and I have the pleasure of being your RAS Outreach Coordinator for the 2020-2021 school year! This is the first of hopefully many outreach blog posts!

I took this position because I am extremely passionate about RAS and our community. RAS is an amazing organization filled with so many talented people. I wanted to write this blog post to discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the RAS outreach opportunities.

So to start off our first big outreach event of the year is usually Gone to Engineering. In this event we get a chance to show off our robots and attract new members to our organization. I remember when I was a first year and I saw the Couchbot driving around I immediately knew that I wanted to be a part of RAS! It is a little disappointing that this year we couldn’t show off our robots but we did get to have a virtual meet up where RAS leaders got to talk to many potential members. I personally spoke to a couple of students and it was a lot of fun getting to share all the opportunities that RAS has to offer. I believe that Gone to Engineering went pretty smoothly and this type of virtual format will most likely be used for our future outreach events.

One thing that we are looking forward to is recruiting more members through our outreach. We are planning on visiting FIG seminar classes to talk to some first years about our organization. Coming up we will be visiting an ECE FIG!

I also included a picture from our booth at the Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day event from the Spring 2020 semester. This was our last in person outreach event and it was a lot of fun! This was personally the first outreach event that I volunteered for. We’re always working hard on our robots to make them even better and it is so amazing getting the chance to show everyone our hard work. (Also Dancebot seemed to be the fan favorite!) I hope this event and other UT programs will be able to continue in a virtual format.

I am looking forward to a great year with RAS and I hope to see you (virtually) at one of our outreach events! As always be sure to join our Microsoft Teams so you can keep up with announcements and upcoming opportunities. You can also contact me by email at rosanna.rincon@utexas.edu.

Author: Rosanna Rincon

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