USC’s Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering (ASBME) has received the 2022 Outstanding Mentoring Program Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The award is given to student chapters that have a robust set of activities that display they are providing strong mentorship to the new members of that organization. The award trophy will be presented to ASBME at the BMES Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas in October.
“We really pride ourselves on our mentorship program, in which we pair new BME students with junior or senior BMEs who have been through the major, [and they can] guide them through how to succeed and answer all their questions,” said Sabrina Sy, current president of USC’s ASBME chapter.
ASBME holds many events each year that focus on community engagement and professional development. For example, they have an initiative called “Project in a Box,” where they go to elementary schools and teach biomedical engineering lessons. Their signature event is the annual Make-a-Thon, in which students design and build a medical device in just one weekend.
“We usually have 12 teams [of] five to six students compete every year. On a Friday evening we give them the prompt that they need to solve or create a technology to address a challenge, and then they’re building, prototyping, designing, brainstorming, from all of Saturday until Sunday evening, and that’s when they present a working prototype to a panel of judges,” Sy said.
Sy credits winning the award to the many mentorship-related events that ASBME has throughout the year. Last year, ASBME’s mentorship chair, Grace True, spearheaded many of the events in the mentorship program. For example, they had a pumpkin carving event during the Halloween season and a mentor-mentee gingerbread house decorating contest.
“Our mentorship program is really robust. We encourage mentors to reach out to their mentees on a weekly basis. Every year we have an increase in the number of people who participate in the mentorship program,” Sy said. “Mentorship outside of just the structured program is something that shows in everything we do in ASBME. I think that showed in our application and I’m really proud that we were able to make it known to the committee that gave out awards.”
Published on October 24th, 2022
Last updated on October 24th, 2022
