Spring 2017 – Page 5 – Seidenberg School News

LST Honoree Speaker Series brings award winners to Pace

A special event series will take place during March and April. The LST Honoree Speaker Series will bring past winners of the prestigious Leadership and Service in Technology (LST) award back to Pace University for a set of lunch and learn events that should be on everybody’s calendar.

Each event takes place on a Wednesday from 12-1:30pm.

As well as getting the opportunity to learn from a set of remarkable trailblazers in the field of technology, attendees will enjoy a free gourmet lunch, free swag, networking with industry leaders and experts, as well as Pace alumni and fellow students, and the chance to win $100 in a raffle!

March 8 – Judy Spitz, LST Honoree

Founding Program Director: Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York (WiTNY), Cornell Tech

RSVP for Judy Spitz here

March 22 – Nicholas Donofrio, LST Honoree

IBM Fellow Emeritus (Ret.) IBM Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology

RSVP for Nicholas Donofrio here

April 19 – Austin A. Adams, LST Honoree

Moderated by Mike Zbranak, Managing Director Deputy Chief Information Officer, Chase Consumer & Community Banking, JPMorgan Chase

Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer (Ret.), JPMorgan Chase

RSVP for Austin A. Adams here

The series is part of an exciting run-up to this year’s LST Awards Ceremony, which takes place in May. This year, Senior Executive VP and CIO of BNY Mellon, Suresh Kumar, will be recognized for his innovation within the tech field. The ceremony is a fantastic opportunity to network with professionals and Seidenberg alumni working within the technology industry.

Seidenberg breakfast club enjoys #tacotuesday

It takes a lot to get some students out of bed early on a Tuesday morning, but the thought of hot breakfast tacos enticed people to leave their warm cocoons and join us for coffee and conversation over a hearty plate of food!

The Seidenberg Breakfast takes place every other Tuesday and offers a theme both in terms of cuisine and conversation topic. Each breakfast has a host who briefly discusses the topic (just for a minute or two!) while everyone enjoys the delicious fare. And at only $2 for all the food and coffee you can consume, it’s a pretty good deal!

Today’s theme was Seidenberg International, and the host was our very own Dean, Dr. Jonathan Hill.

“We are a very international school,” Dr. Hill said. “It’s important that all of us let our international colleagues and friends know that we love them and that we want them here and that we need them very, very much. The point of these [breakfasts] is to foster a greater sense of community. Our strength as a school is that community, and the heart of that strength is the fact that we are such an international place.”

We certainly are – many of our students, faculty, and staff hail from outside of the USA. The chance to learn from other cultures and viewpoints is one we hold dear to our community.

Dr. Hill preps breakfast early Tuesday morning

Beginning at 8:30 and (of course) running past its end time of 10am, the breakfast was overseen by Chef Olga Bogomolova, who ensured the cheese was adequately melted to perfection. Thanks to Olga and student Niamh Fitzsimon for organizing everything!

All are welcome at Seidenberg Breakfast, including students at other Pace colleges, staff and faculty, alumni, and friends and colleagues in the area! We are big on community and always happy to meet new friends. Keep an eye on our calendar for the next event!

NSF Billion Oyster Project video features Pace!

The National Science Foundation (NSF) released a cool new video featuring the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) and Pace University! The Billion Oyster Project is a community of students, teachers, scientists, volunteers, businesses, and schools. Its goal? Getting down and dirty to conduct research and restore the New York Harbor back to its oyster-inhabited glory. With a $5 million grant from the NSF, the project leaders hope to inspire students, specifically middle school students, to help drive the restoration.

At Pace University, the Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (CCERS) and BOP Fellowship trains teachers and educators how to engage students in environmental science and restoration ecology. In 2016, our annual STEM Collaboratory camp teamed up with BOP for an exciting two weeks of research, problem solving, and design thinking. We taught campers HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Google Charts to create a helpful solution.

The NSF video features our very own professor Lauren Birney, the director of Pace University’s STEM Collaboratory. “We’re creating this smart and connected community here in New York City, but then allowing that to grow into other communities,” Birney said. She hopes to build the Billion Oyster Project by continuing to target local middle schools in low-income neighborhoods where students are underrepresented in STEM fields.

Participants aren’t just making new friends, they’re also engaging in STEM activities while restoring the ecosystem in their own backyard! Hands on work teaches students how to measure oysters, test water samples, and other cool activities that keep them active and constantly contributing. The Billion Oyster Project’s website keeps track of teachers, students and volunteers’ work with an interactive map.

Learn more about the 2016 STEM Collaboratory NYC experience, or go further back and check out our Summer Scholars program’s awesome experience with the Billion Oyster Project in 2015!

Pace Women in Tech celebrates official club status in first meeting

The Pace Women in Tech club held its first meeting as an official Pace organization on Monday, February 6, 2017. Led by Seidenberg students Eiman Ahmed and Niamh Fitzsimon, the meeting was a brief introduction to the club and the plans for the upcoming semester.

Aimed to be a welcoming group where members can make new friends and build a peer network, Pace Women in Tech already has a lot planned for this year. Hackathons, internship workshops, and potential attendance to the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration conference in Orlando, Florida, were just some of the things on the table.

The group aims to meet every two weeks and new members are welcome to join them for discussions, workshops and the chance to meet guest speakers from the tech industry – all over free pizza, of course.

“We want to spread awareness for the underrepresented group of women in technology,” said Ava Posner (BS in IT ’18). “My goal is to bring Seidenberg students – especially women – together so they have a network of individuals they can share experiences with, ask questions, and make new friends.”

Pace Women in Tech has an active Facebook group that is recommended for members not only so they can stay up to date with meetings and events here at Seidenberg but for local hackathons and other events taking place outside Pace.

Robots fight it out for top spot in FTC competition

What better way to spend a wintry Sunday than watching robots battle it out for the top spot in the First Tech Challenge regional championship? On

February 5^th, Seidenberg hosted the 8^th annual challenge that saw teams from New York and nearby states descend upon our Pleasantville campus and compete for prizes.

Teams comprised of grades 7-12 students who, over a period of months, had to design, build, and program robots to complete specific types of challenges. They don’t go in unprepared, though. Dr. Richard Kline of the Seidenberg School and organizer of the event also arranges training workshops for students so they can learn. Robot building and programming is at “team workshops where high school students learn design and programming skills using Java and the Android Studio mobile app development system,” said Dr. Kline.

Each year, the contest is different, so even competitors who have taken part before had a unique challenge on their hands!

The excitement in the air was palpable in the moments before the first round of the tournament kicked off. “This is your Super Bowl,” Seidenberg Dean Jonathan Hill told the crowd in his opening remarks.

Dr. Kline thanked everybody for coming out to the championship, which we have also hosted in previous years. He went on to emphasize the main tenets of the First Tech Challenge (FTC) events: gracious professionalism and acting with kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition.

Then it was time to start! Challenges in the competition focused on teams’ abilities to make quick decisions, as they received just 30 seconds to program their robots followed by two minutes where they could use controllers to move them around.

The game was called Velocity Vortex. Robots were tasked to scoop up wiffle balls and a larger yoga ball and throw them into hoops, kind of like basketball. While doing so, they could also claim beacons, which were lights that could be triggered to display their team color.

Each team played in 5 matches for the chance to win trophies, scholarships, internship opportunities and good old fashioned glory.

And the results?

Inspire Award – top overall team as determined by the judges

Winner: 4347 NanoGurus, home-based team from Morris Plains NJ
2nd: 5484 Enderbots, home-based team from Corning, NY
3rd: 7488 Nuts & Volts, Suffern High School, Suffern NY

Competition Winners – champions of the elimination tournament that ended the day – an “alliance” of three teams

Alliance Captain: 6081 i^2robotics, home-based team from Westport, CT
1st Partner: 6347 Geared Up, home-based team from Rome, NY
2nd Partner: 5484 Enderbots

Competition Runners-Up

Alliance Captain: 7486 Team Fusion, Suffern High School, Suffern NY
1st Partner: 4347 NanoGurus
2nd Partner: 12052 Ossining O-Bots, Ossining High School, Ossining NY

It was an exciting and memorable event, helped by the continued dedication of Dr. Kline and volunteers that helped the day run smoothly.

Dr. Kline said: “We are thrilled that so many Seidenberg students and alumni volunteer their time to assist these great robotics teams, not only at the championship, but at the five qualifying tournaments we have held.”

New York Times ranks Pace University high for return on investment

A recent study featured in the New York Times ranked Pace University as number two in the nation for the upward mobility of our students. The article, titled America’s Great Working-Class Colleges, featured a study that listed “colleges ranked by percent of students from the bottom fifth of the income distribution who end up in the top three-fifths.

Pace was also ranked in a report published in The Fiscal Times where it appeared in the top slot of colleges ranked by mobility rate. Despite being a smaller institution, Pace University came out first with a success rate of 55.6 percent of low income students eventually becoming outstanding earners.

Graduates of the Seidenberg School can potentially be among those high earners: the average starting salary for undergraduate degree holders is $72,413, and for graduate degree holders it is $83,050.