Tuesday, March 4, 2014 | TechNews. Student Gift Campaign sets high goals for fundraising Alex Pisconski TECHNEWS WRITER This week the IIT Student Gift launched its fifth annual campaign. Since the introduction of the Student Gift, IIT students havegiven back to the community by improving the quality of the campus experience. Past student gifts include furniture for the MTCC enclosure in 2010, modular furniture for Galvin Library in 2013, helping to complete the reserve textbook collection in 2011, and new water fountains in academic buildings on campus in 2012. This year’s Student Gift will be new bike racks and bike fix-it stations for Main Campus. As the number of students using bikes on campus, and for commuting increases, the available spaces to quickly and easily store bikes on campus has been dwindling. Many students find that bike parking disappears especially quickly during peak class times when it is most ' needed, forcing riders to lock their bikes to other bikes or unapproved places like street signs. The need is clear and the Student Gift Committee is dedicated to making sure this project serves the student body by increasing bike capacity by at least 30 percent. Throughout the campaign, the Student Gift Campaign will be looking for your input into potential locations. The committee hopes that by asking for the opinions of the student body, we will be providing the best service to bike users, and pedestrians as well. This project seeks to create a friendlier commuter atmosphere on campus. The IIT Student Gift is focused on getting students involved in philanthropy and teaching students that together, small gifts can have a big impact. Last year, the total number of student donors was 780; the Student Gift Campaign is looking to exceed that number this year. The IIT Alumni Board has challenged the Student Gift Committee to increase undergraduate participation up to 20 percent, graduating class participation up to 50 percent, and to raise $5,000. If the campaign meets these goals, we willreceive a challenge gift from the Alumni Board that will triple our funding and provide an extra $15,000 toward this year’s project. This would help us make an incredible impact, but it is only attainable with your support. The 2014 Student Gift Campaign was launched last week as part of the second annual Student Engagement and Philanthropy Day. This is how we spread the importance of generosity here on campus. If you want to see change and be part of something that will improve the lives and experiences of future generations of students and alumni, support the Student Gift Campaign! For more information and updates on the 2014 Student Gift Campaign, please visit alumni.iit.edu/gift-2014. HawkTalk launches, helps students improve public speaking skills Anoopa Sundararaj an 8: Khaleela Zaman COPY EDITOR 81 STAFF WRITER How many times have you experienced butterflies in your stomach the morning of a prestnt’ation or an interview? There is a new student organization that can help ease those butterflies, HawkTalk is an environment designed from inception to be comlortable and judgmentefree. This atmosphere will encourage students to enjoy learning. and improve their public speaking skills among their peers. All interested ll'l‘. \"andercook, and Shimer students are encouraged to attend our weekly meetings. Each meeting will only be an hour long, covering prepared speeches. impromptu svsions, and one segment that changes ever eek. A few people will prepare speeches i1 . ance and deliver them at the meetings. Alter they present, there will be a constructive evaluation, during which degrading and discouraging comments will be prohibited Then. the impromptu session \\'1ll commence. Random topics will be given to students to give a 30 to 60 second minuteelong speech about on the spot. The topics could get really cra7y and one such topic could even be spaghetti! \‘\"here anyone can talk tor 30 seconds about spaghetti! The variable segment of a meeting (which sometimes might be a stirp could be anything from a professiona . ewed as a group, a sp ercoming in to give a lecture. or an unannoun 1d debate session. Our aim in all ol'this is to make every zone your comfort zone. We want to make ll'l' students able to communicate more ctl’ lively and enioy it too. Not even the oilicers are g1 it public speakers. but we are extremely mate about thi, goal and attaining it tor ourselves 1nd our 01(111117 iti 111's H itilation. Anoopa Sundar' ' an is the ivondeitul President and Klialeela Zaman is the anesome Secretary of HawkTalk (also the authors of this article.) All of our otlicers cannot wait to get started with the first activities of our ott‘ici- student organization. Our Ficebool; pag ((7. ebook. com/ha kialkiit) is g. .. oui luitter a count (it‘l‘ldV "ilkllT. Check us out on Ficcbook, Tu 1ttt1. and Hauklink to stay updatcdl Our first meeting is otlici 1ll\ set for Tuesday. March 111711 p.111. (location 1 PM 1nd we hope to see you thcitl TEDxIIT prepares for events, releases 2 Speaker names Nirja Shah TECHNEWS WRITER There are 35 days left until the fourth annual TEDxIIT 2014:”Inf1nity Impact.” Amy Lee Segami, the founder of TEDxlIT, and the board members are putting their best efforts to make this event another succEFST'féur years in a row. The event is going to be held on Saturday April 5 from 10 a.m. to 6 pm. at the IIT Tower Auditorium. The team is thrilled to introduce the speakers ranging from IIT students, faculty members and alumni to some wonderful [IT community speakers. The selected speakers range from renowned architects to engineers to entrepreneurs. These speakers will express their ideas in the areas of design, entertainment, technology, renewable energy, diversity, interdisciplinary and entrepreneurship education, eco—architectural design, and social development. They will share their story of success which can create an infinite impact on the worldwide audience. The team is proud to introduce two speakers in this week’s issue of TechNews. They WWW- Berg. Ross Barney is one of the most well- known architects here in the city of Chicago as well as a professor at IIT. As an architect, she focuses on water transportation and water systems to improve the city. Ross Barney is a native Chicagoan and became the first woman to design a federal building when commissioned for the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which replaced the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. She has previously served as a US. Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, planning national parks. Berg is recognized as the world’s fastest reader (according to the Guinness Book of World Records.) His students, at 11 years old, are acing college courses in as little as a week. Berg has discovered brain-based learning strategies for reading, writing, memory, and mm rate in just a few hours’ time. Berg’s Time- Warner book, “Super Reading Secrets,” had 28 reprints, and Barrons Books requested him to write, “Speed Reading, The Easy Way,” for students. Nightingale Conant has sold over $65 million of his programs. Berg’s work has been featured as a breakthrough in Selling, RedBook, Men’s Health, Bottom Line, dozens of newspapers, and on over 1,100 radio and television programs. It is a great honor to have these amazing people come to IIT and share their story with us. TEDxIIT has made a global impact in the past few years and will continue to leave its foot steps behind and share a plethora of inspirational stories among today’s youth, thereby playing an important role in inspiring young leaders around the world. The team is also organizing a pre— event at the MTCC Ballroom on Thursday, March 6 from 5:30 p.111. to 8 pm. streaming some inspiring TED videos, giving out more information about TEDxIIT and announcing a sign-up for volunteers who are interested in helping us organize TEDxIIT. We look forward to having you there. Want to know who‘ are the other speakers? Keep checking this section every week for more information about the amazing speakers. For more information about TEDxIIT, visit our website: TEDxIIT.com http://mypages. iit.edu/~tedxiit/or e—mail us at info@tedxiit. com. IEEE@IIT conducts second General-Body meeting Vijai Baskar COPY EDITOR The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Student Chapter at IIT conducted their second general meeting of the semester on Wednesday, February 26 in the Siegel Hall Auditorium. Mehdi Ganji, President of IEEE@ IIT started off the meeting by talking about the Student branch’s activities and achievements so far in the semester. Ganji also introduced the executive board members whose contributions have made this semester a successful one. Ganji also mentioned that the IEEE student branch of IIT is the most active one within the Chicago region and that the Branch Mentor, Robert Burke had commended the branch’s efforts in involving students in its proceedings and activities. The redesigned branch website has been nominated as the best website among the Chicago IEEE section; This was made possible by the Webmaster, Eric Tendian who is a vital part in the branch’s success. The guest speaker for the meeting was Martin Schray, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation, also Adjunct Industry Professor at IIT. He spoke about the recent developments at Microsoft. Schray used quite an innovative technique in his presentation. He used the motion recognition feature in Kinect to sense his hand and then advance through his slides. Known to all, Schray runs workshops for students to build apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 from scratch using the X Platform Cloud kit. He ran a couple of sample apps that students were building at his events. Schray is also conducting a workshop to build projects using Kinect on April 4 and 5 at the Idea Shop. For this event, students can bring their own cool stuff and learn a lot of other things. He also mentioned that there were a number of Kinect devices at the Idea Shop which can be used by students to build projects on their own. They can check them out using their student ID. . ' There is an upcoming LEEE conference on Transmission and Distribution on April 14 to April 17 at the McCormick Place for student members. Those who are willing to volunteer can attend this conference for free. Even more, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will also sponsor interested students to attend this conference. The SSrC Electric tour which had been cancelled earlier is expected to be rescheduled sometime during late March. This tour will involve students being exposed to all of S&C Electric’s equipment and operations, and interested students can also submit their resumes for opportunities within the company. There is also a Clean Energy tour conducted by IEEE coming up in April. The student branch is also planning a barbecue event in late April when the weather is warmer. Stay tuned to IEEE@IIT news for more details on the event.