STEAM Festival 2017

I enjoyed the STEAM Festival. I think it’s definitely a good idea to get Macaulay students from different years and campuses together and have them interact, since it really is hard to connect with people who seem so far away. I liked seeing everyone’s presentations. Some of them were really impressive. I also liked the Makerspace area.

I do think that everything was really loosely organized from our perspective. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I had the feeling there were more things I should have been doing, even though there wasn’t anything I was “supposed” to be doing. I feel like there could be a little more clarity on what exactly was expected of us while we were there.

When I first heard about the STEAM Festival, I didn’t want to attend the festival because it was on a Sunday and we had many finals and assignments coming up. As a result of these things, I was really discouraged to go. However, when I went it was the complete opposite of what I expected. I loved looking at the different projects and ideas people presented and talked about. I also enjoyed that it was not only seminar one but also seminar three so we could hear about both science and art and the different seminars that we have in store for next year. I really enjoyed the makers space a lot because it allowed us to be very creative and have fun. Overall, it was a great experience and I would be happy to go there again.

The STEAM festival was definitely better than I expected. It was interesting to see how different all the Seminar 1 classes were. Our class focused on different themes in A Chorus of Stones and we all presented different collages that explained that theme. Everyone that came by our table was extremely impressed by how we were able to connect Robert Rauschenberg’s focus on collage in our analysis of the book. While our class did this, other classes from different campuses focused on self-expression, areas in NYC etc. An extremely thoughtful project that I saw was from City College, where the whole class created a book. Each week, the students would post pictures that answered a specific question or had a specific theme. At the end of the semester, they each picked the picture that represented themselves the most and put it in the book. It was interesting to see how different the pictures were, ranging from selfies to action shots and nature. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Makerspace in the lobby. Although my appointment time was short, I was able to make a pin. I felt like this was a nice addition to the festival, and something unique aside from the presentations. Additionally, each student received a little notebook to take notes and collect stamps. In order to get a stamp, the ITFs would ask questions based on the room that we were in It was nice to see how involved the ITFs were in asking questions. It showed how much they care and I was grateful for that. Overall, the STEAM festival was a nice way to get Macaulay students together and have a nice learning experience.

I really enjoyed the Steam Festival, more than I thought I would have. I thought that the make your space station was absolutely brilliant, except there wasn’t much instruction on what to do there. Since I was part of the first group to go to the station, there was nobody there to tell us what to do. Most of us were confused on what to do, and that led to us wasting time and not finishing in 15 minutes. I thought that getting stamps was a fun way to make sure we were participating and actually learning. I liked how we were paired with Seminar 3 kids because we go to learn about a lot of interesting topics like post-partum depression and the cycle of mental illness. I would like to suggest maybe one or two more activities to do besides the make your space station because towards the last 45 minutes everyone had already gotten stamped and we were just standing around our table talking to other people in our group.

I really enjoyed the Steam Festival in its entirety and walked away with a lot of interesting information.

One of the best parts about Macaulay are the events where we get to meet other Macaulay students, and one such event was the STEAM festival. Typically, this event is for seminar 3 classes. However, this was the first year where seminar 1 students were also allowed to come. I think the best part about this was that we got to interact with not only students our own year but also students who were older and could give us tips and advice on how to do better or what to expect. It was interesting to see the projects that all the students brought. Some brought boards and posters while others had laptops and videos. In addition, they gave out cute STEAM notebooks in which we had to accumulate a bunch of stamps that we got every time we visited a new room or floor. My personal favorite part about the whole festival was that we got to make pins and magnets. You could make as many pins as you wanted. They could be designs that were available or ur own customized design. I would definitely love to go to events like this in the future too where we could meet students from all the other campuses.

The STEAM Festival at the Macaulay Honors College was an attempt at bringing together the arts focused first seminar and science focused third seminar. STEAM, of course, stands for science technology engineering arts mathematics. There were students from all CUNY campuses there so it was great to have the time to interact with them and to learn about their experiences in their respective campuses. It was interesting to see how just in the first seminar how students were learning about and experiencing the arts in different ways. Our class’s projects were based off of A Chorus of Stones and each group represented a chapter from the work, showcasing the books contents as well as personal experiences and/or opinions. A class from Baruch had gone around the city taking pictures of art and then put all the pictures in groups. This way, so many different things were able to be seen with a certain commonness. A lot of classes had short videos made on certain topics. For example, another class from Baruch research Astoria, Queens and made a video and brochures on the significance and diversity of the culture of Astoria. Others had made films about topics ranging from their experiences with Macaulay in general to personal relationships in regards to society. Seminar 3 students also had very interesting topics. Although they were science oriented, they were interesting and easy to understand. I remember this one project from Brooklyn College students that studied the relationship between nature and concentration in school work, which was very interesting and relevant. Another project researched the differences in the cafeterias of Baruch College and New York University. They found that although NYU offers more variety, Baruch offers more healthy options. I liked how the ITFs were asking us about what we had learned and they were very engaging with all students. The button making station was very fun. The buttons came out very nice. Overall, I would say that it was a great endeavor in bringing together students of all campuses and of different years with different works to present.