At last after going through the long process of recruiting people into the engineering club (and the rocket team) we've finally had the team's first meeting of the school year. The "organization fair" was a bit of an ordeal. Julia and I made a ton of cookies that we cut out in the shapes of gears and rockets (with 3D printed cookie cutters!), we made a poster with light up letters (that didn't work so well), put out our rockets, a video, a catapult we made at some point during last year, some virtual reality goggles (the phone version), we donned our engineering club T-shirts, sweat nearly to death, and waited for students to flock to us all fighting over the sign up sheet for the illustrious engineering club. Of course, in a school that is mainly communication and business majors, I think most people tried to flock away from our stand if that's possible. I think people take one look at the word engineering, think of the math class that mentally scarred them for life, and run away. Perhaps any sort of eye contact with the engineering people might be deadly. To be fair we did accost a few people, but that's ok.

Anyway, here's a picture of Michael talking to Dr. Arena (our advisor) amid the madness:

A week later we held the first engineering club meeting, we located the people interested in joining the team and we scheduled our meeting. Our first meeting wasn't too exciting, we introduced the club to the freshman, talked about what we were doing , were going to do in the future, etc. So for our future plans, we plan on trying to perfect our 1/2 scale model this semester and starting on our full scale next semester. The first order of business will be coming up with plans for an improved launch pad (stability is the key), coming up with plans for optimizing our 1/2 scale's performance, finding a good field for us to test on (the last one was... not the best), contacting some of the rocket people we met last year, and buying another motor for the 1/2 scale. So, just a few things. For our next meeting we're going to take a team field trip to the STEAM forge in Burlington, NC to check out some of their tools and materials that we could potentially use. Normally we would have to pay for a membership, but the maker hub at our school just partnered with them, so now it's free to all Elon University students. We're all pretty excited.