"A Day in the Life of a College Engineer" Video
Santa Clara University Student Section

The original Goal of our project was to provide an entertaining way to educate high school students about the opportunities in Engineering. In this project we intended to document the highlights of an Engineering degree from the students perspective. The focus of our documentary was intended to be lab experiments, classroom demonstrations and student interviews with a youthful undertone. These goals remained our focus and intent throughout the project.

We started our project by gathering video clips of different events occurring on campus in the school of Engineering. Next we taped clips of our main actress moving from scene to scene to give the video an overall story line. These clips were edited together and set to music to complete our video theme of "A Day in the Life of a College Engineer."

The outcome of our project is a well formulated Career Guidance outreach video, that could be easily distributed throughout the university, our society and interested high schools. This outcome was intended from the very start and we are pleased with our results. The potential significance for the outcomes of SWE is that it will give the Society of Women Engineers positive publicity as well as promote a healthy understanding of Engineering as a profession in today’s youth.

We are recommending that the 99-00 chapter of SCU-SWE continues to build upon the idea of communicating to younger audiences through entertaining video footage and upbeat music. The video offers tangible proof to uninformed audiences that Engineers do interesting things that are applicable to everyday life.

The overall funding that we received to complete our project was adequate for an amateur video such as ours; however, in order to produce a professional quality video the prices increase drastically. The main reason for this price increase is that to get footage of various classes and teachers during a sporadic time frame, would require paying a videographer to come on campus several different times. We used a non-professional videographer (SWE members) to tape different events, because it was more convenient and less costly.

The year time frame allotted for our project completion was adequate, but looking back we wish that we would have made more progress in the early months.

We encountered scheduling problems for shooting video clips, mainly because we are students with rigorous course loads, and not much extra time. This problem was overcome with cooperation from all of our student officers and an extension of our original deadline.

Our video was publicly shown at the National SWE Convention in Phoenix Arizona, and went over really well. We intend to donate a copy to Santa Clara University’s Career Services library, as well as the SWE Career Guidance’s library. As a SWE outreach project we plan to show the completed video to high schools in the area beginning in the fall of 1999.