Revere alums return with tips for students

REVERE – A handful of Rumney Marsh Academy students spent 20 minutes trying to save the life of an egg Friday all in the name of engineering.Revere High School alumni Xuyen Mai and Gabriel Abreau both engineering majors at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Sara Boukdad, a sophomore at Stonehill College and Amel Derras Chouk, a sophomore at Tufts University visited the middle school to extol the virtues of engineering.”It warms my heart,” said Revere High School teacher Nancy Barile.As high school students Mai, Boukdad and Derras Chouk took part in Barile’s Future Teacher program and Barile said she is thrilled to see the now-college students still giving back. The Future Teachers program puts high schoolers in the middle school to work with students as mentors. Barile said Mai contacted her and asked if she could come back to the school over Christmas break to conduct an outreach program and she was happy to have her former students back under her wing.Abreau, a junior and Mai, a sophomore, work for the Diversity Office of the College of Engineering at UMass.”We do community outreach to inspire kids, to get them interested in the science field, the STEM, science, technology, engineering and math, field,” Abreau said.It’s the first time they have been back to Revere working with students at their alma mater.”It’s cool seeing how everything has changed,” he said. “And we’re on the other side now, teaching kids.”Mai said she believes she could have benefited from such a program when she was in middle school.”I don’t think I even knew what engineering was,” she said.During her senior year of high school she took an environmental science class that rocked her world.”It really inspired me,” she said. “I love energy and green science.”She now majors in civil and environmental engineering.During their introduction Mai and her colleagues talked about the perks of engineering, touting it as a versatile career path. She said on top of math and science skills they’d also pick up problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that would serve them well in any career.Abreau also said the field is as near to recession proof as you can get.”It’s a growing field,” he said. “There are a lot of jobs and they’re always increasing even in the recession and the money’s always good.”Eighth-grader Shannon Logan said engineering is a natural choice for her.”I love math and I love science and here they go together,” she said. “If I had to chose it would be kind of hard.”After hearing about why they should study engineering, students got to experience how it works when the co-eds challenged them to use the materials provided to build a nest that would protect an egg dropped from a certain height.Logan and Christopher Alfaro padded a plastic cup with pipe cleaners and cotton and locked it in tight with rubber bands. They came in third after their egg, dropped for 1.5 meters, broke. Fernando Buenrostro and his teammates won the event when the egg they wrapped in cotton, cloth, rubber bands and construction paper held together with craft sticks survived a two-meter drop.Barile watched as the college age kids coached the middle-schoolers.”It shows the strength of the program,” she said referring to the Future Teachers Program. “Now it’s on the college level too. Not everyone wants to be a teacher but everyone wants to help.”Chris Stevens can be reached at [email protected].