Welcome: Greetings from the WPI Career Development Center
Worcester was part of a record-setting winter here in New England, with February ranking as the snowiest month in the city’s history. As the snow melted and summer began to show itself, we embraced another record here at WPI: the largest graduating class in the Institute’s history. On May 16, 2015, WPI welcomed 1,680 new members to its alumni community. In total, 956 bachelor’s degrees, 682 master’s degrees, and 42 PhDs were awarded during WPI’s 147th Commencement exercises. Over the next several months, the staff of the Career Development Center will continue to survey these students regarding their post-graduation plans. This information is used to produce our annual outcomes report, which features success rates and average salary statistics. For the first time ever, we are also inviting our employer partners to assist us in capturing this data. If you have recently hired a WPI student for a full-time, part-time, internship, or co-op opportunity, please consider letting us know by clicking here.
Although student traffic has quieted down since the middle of May, the CDC and WPI community have been active on campus and on the road this summer. Last month in Pomona, Calif., Team WPI-CMU placed in the top third of 24 teams at the international DARPA Robotics Challenge. The object of this competition was for teams to develop robots that can assist humans in natural and man-made disasters. The WPI-CMU team, consisting of faculty, engineers, and students from WPI and Carnegie Mellon University, showcased their humanoid Atlas robot WARNER as he completed a series of challenges related to disaster response. WPI has been on the forefront of robotics education and currently offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in Robotics Engineering.
In 2012, in recognition of WPI’s leadership role in robotics research and technology, NASA selected us as the first and only college to host a NASA Centennial Challenge, an event aimed at developing technologies to improve NASA’s capability to explore diverse landscapes in space. In celebration of this designation, WPI and NASA launched the TouchTomorrow festival that same year to engage children of all ages in STEM education. We held the third annual TouchTomorrow event on June 13 of this year. Every inch of campus was utilized to create a family-friendly festival of interactive games and exhibits highlighting technology, science, robots, and space.
Meanwhile, CDC staff members have been busy traveling to conferences across the country this summer, presenting successes and learning best practices to improve the services we provide our students, alumni, and employer partners. We had representatives at the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conference in Anaheim, Calif., the Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers (EACE) in Pittsburgh, Penn., and the CSM Symposium in Austin, Texas. We will be soon be attending the Summer Institute in Alumni Relations in Burlington, Vt. In addition to conferences, we have traveled to several site visits across Massachusetts and New York, facilitated through EACE, in an effort to connect our students and alumni with employers like yourself. Back in the office, we are actively preparing for a new academic year and fall recruiting season. We wish you all a happy end to the summer and hope to see you on campus this fall.
