Clubs & Activities

While Tandon/Poly’s labs and classrooms drive the community’s knowledge base forward, much of the school's most striking innovation has been realized through the extracurricular work of students and faculty. Ad hoc projects and clubs bring together multi-disciplinary community members from a variety of backgrounds, leveraging their experience and innate curiosity to drive sustainable transformation. In this way, clubs harness the knowledge built by research to practically impact the broader community. The ingenuity of the school's members shines through this hands-on and result-oriented work. 

Early in my research, I came across one particularly interesting example of such a club: Polytechnic University's 1996 American Tour de Sol team, where students and faculty teamed up to convert a standard gasoline Honda Civic to a fully electric vehicle and entered it in the rally alongside EVs built by numerous notable corporations, labs, and academic institutions. The photograph of Poly's vehicle at the Tour de Sol is transporting, and the viewer can feel the buzz in the air as onlookers check out the futuristic-looking-in-a-retro-way car.

Michael Bianchi, a tech business owner and avid electric car enthusiast, maintained detailed annual reports on the American Tour de Sol, and spoke with the 1996 Poly team, interviewing students and faculty about technical details of the vehicle. their own backgrounds, and what it was like to work on the project. One of the faculty members Bianchi inteviewed was Peter Voltz, a professor in Poly's eletrical engineering department serving as a faculty advisor to the team, and who is now Vice Dean of Academics at Tandon. In his interview for the report, Professor Voltz highlights students' self-driven, collaborative, and curious nature, saying "'What impresses me is how student enthusiasm has grown over the last year. They do it as a totally extra curricular activity, on top of their normal course load, without receiving any academic credit. They do all the planning, design and work and I don't have to do anything.' The team meets once per week for 2 hours and then works on the car at odd hours during the week. It is an small, enthusiastic, tight group that works real well together. The existence of the [...] program has caused the university library to acquire EV related books and start an EV section." (Bianchi). The statement on how the team caused the university to accumulate more materials on EV technology further displays how community members advance the school's knowledge base and innovativeness through their extracurricular work. Furthermore, the participation in this competition is an excellent example of the school extending its contributions into a collaborative arena, where other universities, corporations, startups, and more all poured their insights into the electric car industry.

This earlier project involving electric cars undoubtedly set a foundation for continuing work on the subject, such as one of Tandon’s Vertically Integrated Projects, the NYC Clean Fleet project, which aims to work with  partners to “design and prototype technological innovations to help the NYC Fleet Division of the New York City Department of Citywide Administration (DCAS) implement Mayor de Blasio’s Clean Fleet Plan [...] calling for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the municipal fleet 50% by 2025 and 80% by 2035.” (NYU Tandon). In less than 30 years, NYU Tandon has been a critical contributor in driving electric car technology from the early days of racing modified retro-looking cars to the present day, where cities need to adopt the infrastructure necessary to support the inevitable rise of widespread, futuristic, consumer, electric vehicles. One of the continuing themes during this span of time has been collaboration. Electric vehicles have reached their modern evolution through collaboration, in part thanks to Tandon/Poly, and the future of electric vehicles will also be written by Tandon and its collaborators, such as the New York City government in this case.

This Clean Fleet project also serves as an illustration of one of the most prominent facets of clubs and activities at Tandon today: the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIPs), which are long term and ambitious projects that bring together multidisciplinary engineers to solve relevant issues for human society. There are numerous Vertically Integrated Projects, many of which deal with sustainability. Many of Tandon’s most impactful community projects have been VIPs.

One particularly fascinating VIP is the Urban Food Lab, a food sustainability initiative focused on hydroponic vertical farming. The Urban Food Lab has been running for a few years, partnered with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and the Association for Vertical Farming. In  those years, the students and faculty who have run the project have taken on different aspects of vertical farming, creating a more robust and sophisticated Urban Food Lab. In their final report to the Green Grants program, through which the Urban Food Lab was funded, the team discussed how sub-projects included “making cosmetics using farm fresh flowers, [...] a reproducibility study for the composting of polystyrene foam (aka Styrofoam), the enhancement of air quality in a  workplace with a vertical farm, and the auto adjustment of pH levels for spirulina (an edible algae).” (Urban Food Lab Final Report). The report also discusses how team members participated in “showcases, community events such as the Social Good Summit, and hosted outreach  events by inviting public speakers and an expo to present their project ideas.” (Urban Food Lab Final Report). 

The Urban Food Lab is also particularly interesting because their research space occupies the basement of the NYU Tandon Makerspace. The Makerspace was conceptualized as a hub for the Tandon community to collaborate and come up with interesting ideas, and this is a great example of it being used for such. If more urban residents could grow food efficiently in their basements, there would be widespread benefits, from less ecological stress due to conventional farming methods, to things like potentially cleaner air in polluted areas. The photograph above illustrates the excitingness of the work taking place, in a basement where food is grown on pink LED lit shelves by students in lab coats.  Many other such projects are being fleshed out in the Makerspace, which Alexandra Leon described in a Block Club Chicago article as equipping any NYU student with "access to commercial-grade equipment that’s typically seen only in specialized graduate laboratories" (Leon). The articles also mentions that "MakerSpace will also allow students to connect with the city’s larger tech and engineering community by hosting "hackathons," guest lectures and other special events," (Leon) showcasing its versatility and allure for promoting various projects and initiatives.

Clubs and activities help illustrate to the world the tangible value of the learning taking place at Tandon/Poly. When looking at the incredible innovations coming out of the school, it is no surprise that Tandon/Poly has served as a guiding force globally in the sustainability field. The school's lasting patronage of external organizations will be explored in the next section.