A Mini-Congress in Partnership with Alfa Foundation
UANL OSA Student Chapter
One of the OSA UANL Student Chapter main compromises and objectives is to develop and invite young minds into the science world. This time we took lead and looked forward to organize an Educational Congress for talented high school students. As the last event organized by the Officers Board 2015-2017 this was the main event of the season.
In order to reach talented students we made an initial contact with the Alfa Foundation. Our efforts started since February 5th, 2016 when the OSA UANL Student Chapter officers visited the Alfa Foundation educational offices in order to give a brief presentation about OSA, the Student Chapter, our goals, past events and our educational project. Alfa is one of the biggest groups in México. Alfa is a company that manages other companies. They have Nemak, a leading provider of innovative light-weighting solutions for the automotive industry, specializing in the development and manufacturing of aluminum components for powertrain and body structure; Alpek, one of the world’s largest producers of polyester (PTA, PET and fibers), which also leads the Mexican market in petrochemicals such as polypropylene, expandable polystyrene and caprolactam; Sigma, an important producer, marketer and distributor of highly recognized branded foods in Mexico, the United States and Europe; Alestra, a leading provider of information technology and telecommunications services for the enterprise segment in Mexico; Alfa Planetarium, a science based museum with an IMAX Dome screen and an observatory; and, Newpek, a company in the hydrocarbons industry in Mexico and the United States.
Alfa Foundation has an educational project in which they select high profile students from middle schools in order to enhance their knowledge and academic skills outside regular classroom hours. Recently they launched a full time high school for high profile students with national recognition diploma. Basically, this is one of the best chances to get future researchers all in the same institution.
We proposed a mini-congress in which Students from Bachelor, Masters and PhD levels were going to share their experiences, knowledge and research areas. After this brief meeting, Alfa Foundation designed the Alfa Planetarium as a perfect space to organize a mini-congress of this type. The next 2 months of work between OSA UANL Student Chapter and Alfa Foundation were based on tight communication and share of experiences and knowledge. Finally the Mini-Congress came in action.
A Plenary session in an IMAX Dome Screen consisted on a presentation of brief talks. The exposed topics were Optical Fibers, Hollow Core Fibers, Biomedical Optics, Women in Science, 3D Scanning & Printing, Atomic Force Microscopy and finally a brief talk about Energy. The second section was a brief poster presentation on an Astronomic like hall; several Bachelor Students presented the OSA Educational posters in a banner format. This also was useful to share close experience between students, presenters and Alfa Foundation Staff.
At the end, the event was a complete success. Days later we received great feedbacks regarding students feeling very interested in the life of science; they also stated that most of them learned about new disciplines of science via the congress and that they were very pleased with the results of the project.
We want to thank Alfa Foundation, our supportive Faculty staff but overall our Student Members, the OSA Foundation for the Educational Posters, the OSA Chapters and Sections, especially John Taylor for being extremely supportive in our projects and answering our numerous questions.
As a Developing Country OSA Student Chapter from one of the capital industrialized cities in Latin America, we want to invite the Society’s leaders to share our passion with their colleagues and support our projects, we feel motivated by our local mentors, but a global scope and experience is always welcome. Thank you.
