Spring Job Fair – Thursday, April 5 – 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. – Mabee Ballrooms, 3rd Floor Ragsdale

Career and Professional Development has an exciting event coming up that provides internships, part-time and full-time job opportunities for students – the Spring Job Fair. Please take a moment to learn about this event below.

Spring Job FairThursday, April 5 – 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. – Mabee Ballrooms, 3rd Floor Ragsdale Center

The St. Edward’s University Spring Career Fair provides an opportunity to network with employers interested in hiring students and alumni for full-time job opportunities. This event will allow students to meet with visiting representatives to discuss career opportunities.
We have had over 30 organizations register and companies are still battling to get in on the fair! To see who is coming and what positions they are hiring for, please click here.
How can Career and Professional Development help students prepare for these events?
If you need help sprucing up their resumes, please take advantage of the following services we provide:
Additionally, please attend the following Meetup:
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Career and Professional Development in Moody Hall 134.

Certificate in Hands-on Nanotechnologies

For the past two years, St. Edward’s University has been in a partnership with the UT-Austin NASCENT Nanotechnology Center to offer a Certificate in Hands-on Nanotechnologies that consists of 3 online courses with portable nanotechnology labs.
Course 1:  Nanofabrication and Nanomaterials  (summer)
Course 2:  Nanodevices (following summer)
Course 3:  Nanotech Innovation (fall semester after Course 2)
Students register through the UT system and credit for each course transfers back to SEU as PHYS 3345 Special Topics in Physics and can count toward a minor in physics.  Crisel Suarez, who graduated this past May as a math major, recently completed the program and is now enrolled in the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Physics PhD Program to study photonics.  If you register for Course 1 for this summer or have any questions, please contact Paul Walter (pauljw@stedwards.edu).

Atmospheric Science Talk: Friday at 10 am

Rennie Selkirk from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and PI the TICOSONDE Balloon Sounding Project will give a talk Friday, May 26 at 10 am in JBWS 362 (the physics lab room).

“The TICOSONDE Balloon Sounding Project: Profiling Water Vapor, Ozone and Sulfur Dioxide in Costa Rica Since 2005.”

All are welcome to attend.

SELKIRK-Ticosonde

New Publication in The Physics Teacher by SEU Faculty

Drs. Gary Morris and Paul Walter have a publication that appears in the March issue of The Physics Teacher titled, “Transition Matrices:  A Tool to Assess Student Learning and Improve Instruction.” Common multiple-choice diagnostics are often given to students at the beginning and end of a semester to assess how much learning has taken place.   Previous work by Dr. Morris provided a way of ranking the answer choices from worst to best.  This work constructs a 5 x 5 matrix for each question that provides the percentage of students that made each pre-/post-test selection possibility and makes it easy to determine whether students are not just moving to the correct answer but also if they are at least making some progress by moving to a better wrong answer.  This can provide valuable information for an instructor.  The authors constructed a tool to perform the analysis that is freely available to physics instructors.  The approach was applied to the Force Concept Inventory for first-semester introductory physics, but can be adopted and applied to other similar multiple-choice diagnostics where the wrong answers function as distractors.  The abstract is available at http://aapt.scitation.org/toc/pte/55/3?expanded=55.  A freely available version of the article is available on the arXiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01565.

Drs. Walter and Morris also published 2016 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings titled, “Assessing Student Learning and Improving Instruction with Transition Matrices.”  The proceedings are freely available at http://www.compadre.org/per/perc/conference.cfm?Y=2016#PRP89.  One interesting finding in that work is that the likelihood of moving to the correct answer choice on the Force Concept Inventory was independent of which wrong answer choice was chosen on the pre-test.  Future work will investigate whether that holds true for larger data sets and various instructional approaches.

Nanotechnology Course Offerings Information Session

The folks from UT-Austin’s NASCENT Nanotechnology Center will be giving an informational session on Monday, March 6, 5 – 6 pm in JBWS 362.  The 3-course sequence Hands-on Nanotechnologies are online and students receive kits to complete labs throughout the semester.  Each course will count as PHYS 3345 Special Topics in Physics credit at SEU.  Please see the attached flyers and let Paul Walter know if you have any questions.   Come attend the information session to meet the instructors, see an example of the labs, and get a feel for the topics covered.

Flyer_Hands-On Nanotechnologies Certificate Program

NASCENT-Flyer

Three more weather balloon launches from St. Edward’s

There have been three more launches from St. Edward’s recently.  The took place from just outside of Moody Theatre on September 1st, 4th, and 11th.  Once processed, data from the flights is hosted on St. Edward’s Institutional Repository at http://ir.stedwards.edu/ozone/.

weather-balloon-launch-9-1-2016-061September 1 launch (AT004):
Our weather balloon launches are funded by the Capital Area Council of Governments (CAPCOG) and on this day Matthew Holderread from CAPCOG joined us.  Graduate students Kelsey Emmons and Chris Cormier along with undergraduate Gilbert Rivera all helped with the balloon launch.

September 4 launch (AT005):Launch Prep on September 1 (Flight AT004)
Launch prep during the September 4 launch.  Kelsey Emmons, Gilbert Rivera, and fellow undergraduate Andy Barnes all helped with the balloon launch.  During this phase the balloon train is assembled and they are filling the balloon about 15 minutes prior to launch.  The first five balloon launches thus far all traveled far to the west of Austin.  The winds are changing and our next flight (AT006) traveled to the east.

September 11 launch (AT006):
Chris Cormier and undergraduates Anais Matalet and Valeria Gonzalez helped with the balloon launch.  As soon as the balloon is let go everything happens quite quickly.

After this launch we were notified by Jack and Jane Willy of our ozonesonde instrument landing in their backyard.  A special thanks to both of them for letting us retrieve one of our instruments, which are partly re-usuable.

If the wind conditions are favorable, we will launch Monday, September 12 at ~1 pm just outside of Moody Theatre.

University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Teaching Fellows Program

Dear St. Edward’s Students,

Interested in serving children and families? Interested in a cost-free Master of Ed. Degree? Interested in increasing your chance of acceptance to medical, business, or law school? In spiritual, academic, and professional growth? Lead the Change by becoming an ACE teacher through University of Notre Dame’s Teaching Fellow Program! Our program will be here on campus on Thursday (Sept. 1) and Friday (Sept. 2) of next week looking for outstanding St. Edward’s students.

In the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Teaching Fellows program, passionate college graduates serve children and families as teachers in under-resourced Catholic schools, grow as leaders while earning a cost-free Masters, and joyfully share their faith in the communities in which they live and work.

Erin Rosario, a graduate from the program, will be here on campus to speak with anyone interested! Erin was a Pre-Med and Psychology major who taught middle school math and science in Oklahoma City, where she grew spiritually and professionally while living in community with five other ACE teachers. A typical day in ACE involves teaching during the day, coaching or tutoring in the afternoon, cooking, eating and praying with your community over dinner, and completing your M.Ed coursework– all in the name of service to God and to our eternal role model, Christ the Teacher.

If you’re interested in transforming the lives of children by becoming a teacher, while being transformed yourself, please see when/where Erin will be when she’s on campus. Stop by to see her!

Thursday, Sept. 1
6p: ACE Info Session in conjunction w/ Campus Ministry & Career Services in the Community Room
8-9p: Coffee Hours in Jo’s @ Ragsdale
Friday, Sept. 2
12 – 4p: Available for meetings with students, faculty, and staff
4:30-6:30p: Coffee Hours in Jo’s @ Ragsdale
Thank you,
Erin