iVelas: A launchpad for transfer students
When criminology major Leigh Brixius first walked into Assistant Dean Adrienne Provost’s Transfer Transitions course, she did not expect her summer to end with 3D-printed rocket parts, engineering lab sessions, or an invitation to present her work to at an international conference of aerospace experts. Yet that is exactly what happened through iVelas, a new interdisciplinary and intercultural bridge program designed to open STEM pathways for community-college transfer students.
iVelas, short for Interdisciplinary Virtual Exchanges with Liberal Arts and Sciences, brings together the University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, Santa Fe College, the College of Central Florida and Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. The idea is to give ambitious students early access to research, global collaboration and the kind of real-world problem solving that builds both competence and confidence.
“A big piece of it is experiential learning,” said Matthew J Traum, Ph.D., an instructional professor with the UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Traum co-leads iVelas with Provost. “Having a real project that is not just academic, students can both learn from it, but then also produce something that has tangible meaningful value in the outside world.”
This year, the students tackled a deceptively simple goal: design a low-cost rocket altimeter. Commercial altimeters cost hundreds of dollars and break easily. “I ended up buying a couple of altimeters {for my classroom use} and by the end of the semester all three had been destroyed,” Traum said. His solution was to let students redesign the device from scratch so that it would be less expensive, sturdier and more accessible for school or hobby use.
Transfer students step into rocket science
Three liberal arts and sciences transfer students joined the project with pre-engineering students. Although they lacked engineering specific experience, they brought fresh perspectives, creativity and critical thinking to the design process.
Brixius joined the project because she wanted to break old patterns. “I historically have a problem with building relationships with professors. I decided that once I transfer to UF, I am going to fix that once and for all.” Now on a pre-med track at UF, she asked Provost how she could find research opportunities. According to Brixius, “She straight up offered, like right then and there.”
Brixius arrived with no background in rockets. “I had no idea really. I do not know the first thing about rockets.”
She soon discovered that her earlier experience building guitars and working with wood translated surprisingly well. “There actually was a link, somehow, between guitar building and rocket science, and that link was understanding materials.”
Her first experience in the engineering lab was unforgettable. “The engineering lab is basically a candy store,” she said.
Building confidence through hands-on STEM
Longtime Santa Fe College counselor and rocketry mentor Jimmy Yawn helped guide the project. He describes himself as “an old guy who has been building rockets since the 1960s,” and is deeply committed to supporting transfer students. Yawn is more than a rocket enthusiast. He is the Career Exploration Center Coordinator at Santa Fe College and a member of the National Association of Rocketry (NAR). Yawn’s membership in NAR allows the team to fly rockets at the Santa Fe campuses
“The purpose of this project is to increase transfer success rates from state colleges like Santa Fe into advanced programs at UF,” Yawn said. Many students feel intimidated when stepping onto a large university campus, and hands-on work helps ease that transition. “Students persist in fields if they feel like there is a good chance for success.”
Yawn had previously designed a very inexpensive altimeter for another project, and Traum recognized that this early design could be the basis for a far more ambitious, student-driven engineering exercise.
After a summer of hard work, testing, and iteration, the students improved the altimeter design significantly. “Memory for data storage is now effectively infinite,” Traum said. “With the previous version, you could get maybe two launches. Now, we can launch thousands of times before needing to clear the memory.”
As the summer ended, Traum was surprised by how deeply the liberal arts students engaged with the engineering process. “I expected all the engineers to want to keep participating, and the liberal arts students to say, ‘Ok, that was fun,’ but instead they all said, ‘we want to keep working on this!’”
Preparing students for a global engineering world
This summer, the iVelas team was supported by Eduardo Verri Liberado, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Control and Automation Engineering at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil. Liberado joined the team remotely via Zoom to support the altimeter design process. In upcoming iVelas offerings the program will integrate more intercultural learning by pairing students with peers in Brazil through Virtual Exchange. The goal is to prepare all participants for the global nature of modern engineering and professional practice.
“Today’s engineers cannot avoid working in an international setting. It is unavoidable,” Traum said. “But nowhere in our curriculum is there any sort of formal intercultural, or international training.” iVelas fills this gap by positioning cross-cultural collaboration as a core element.
Provost hopes to grow the program, involve language students, and create more robust Brazil-U.S. exchanges as iVelas develops.
A stage full of rocket scientists
In January, the team will present their work at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech in Orlando, one of the largest aerospace forums in the world. For Brixius, this opportunity still feels unreal.
“I mean, it is a convention of literal rocket scientists, and I am this criminology guitar-builder.”
Her final takeaway captures the spirit of iVelas. “I always felt that I was stuck in this criminology box. How on earth am I going to get STEM research? There is nothing I can contribute. But there is; there is always something.”
A program with lift-off
“The pilot program has shown that interdisciplinary teams and cross-campus collaboration can open doors for transfer students who might otherwise assume those doors are closed,” Provost said.
“It builds self-esteem and social esteem, and builds it using technical competence,” ,said Yawn.
For students like Leigh Brixius, that competence is already opening opportunities they never imagined. For iVelas the journey has only begun.