Each year Iowa State hosts a collection of events to celebrate Engineers’ Week. This includes Button Lunches, a Trivia Night, and speakers, and culminates in a Banquet where student organizations are recognized for their contributions to the Iowa State Engineering Community.
At this year’s Banquet, our HKN chapter was honored to receive the Most Creative Virtual Event Award for the Virtual Steam Tunnels Tour we hosted in Fall 2020! As a Nu Chapter tradition, each year our chapter does a tour of the steam tunnels under our university. However, due to the ongoing pandemic we felt it wasn’t safe to do so this academic year, so we got creative! We worked with Michael Murray, a Senior Manager Engineer at FP&M, to recreate this tradition in a virtual format.
During the tour hosted in Webex, Michael provided excellent first-person imagery from the inside of the steam tunnels to simulate the experience. Although we did not get a full “in the tunnels” experience, we got to see diagrams and maps that provided extra information on the inner workings on the tunnels and their history. This technical information would have been difficult to present on an in-person tour, so even those of us that had seen the steam tunnels before experienced something new.
Check out our chapter’s past awards and upcoming events here on our website.
