DEI Seminar Series: Navigating DEI Within Engineering Academia

Our final event of the semester was a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) seminar series. We hosted it with UM's Women in Aeronautics and Astronautics (WAA), the Graduate Student Committee in Aerospace (GSAC), and Michigan Aeronautical Science Association (MASA).

This month's DEI installation was focused on DEI initiatives within engineering academia. We were ecstatic to hear from the UM Aerospace Engineering department‘s Prof. Ken Powell; Ms. Kimberly Burton, director of Culture, Community, and Equity for the College of Engineering; and of course, our very own College of Engineering's Dean Gallimore. We got to learn about how attitudes towards DEI have changed over time, the great strides the DEI community has made here at the University, and how they plan to move forward in their goals for diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Michigan. We were also lucky to hear personal accounts of how DEI efforts affected our panelists, how they navigated them, and what they've learned from them.

We are very grateful for our panelists' contributions, and for everyone else who helped us bring this event to life.

Lucasfilm Ltd. Panel and Luncheon

In association with the Black Film Society here at UM, BSA hosted a panel with Lucasfilm Ltd, where Messrs. Cary Phillips and Ryan Smith talked about technology and its place in Hollywood. Mr. Phillips is an R&D supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, and Mr. Smith is the manager for Global Diversity Recruitment Programs at Lucasfilm Ltd. This panel event was followed by a recruitment luncheon the following day.

A glowing review from one of our attendees: “Mr. Cary Phillips talked to us about working at Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm. He showed us some of the projects that he worked on, including Marvel movies like Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and many other notable franchises.

The presentation was full of clips dissecting how certain scenes were manufactured (adding art to a background, subtracting certain elements of a background, how to add shadows and light to a CGI costume, etc.). He really emphasized that people with various disciplines and interests would enjoy working at ILM. He discussed the different roles that ILM has: artists, animators, software engineers who worked with machine learning to implement changing features, and supervisors.”

All in all, it was a very exciting and illuminating experience.

Student Org Celebration: Advocacy and Support Award

The College of Engineering held its first ever student org celebration, where the engineering organizations focused on supporting students academically and professionally were celebrated for their achievements. We got the opportunity to meet other College of Engineering student organizations and find out about the work they are doing.

Before the celebration, student organizations got nominated by students, who believed the orgs deserved recognition in some way. BSA was the lucky recipient of the Advocacy and Support Award, for all the work we have done so far. This means everything to us, since this is our first year as a student organization. We are looking forward to doing even more and being even better advocates for our community.