NGSEA wins the 2021 SEI Graduate Student Chapter of the Year Award

The Northeastern Graduate Structural Engineering Association (NGSEA) is a group for graduate students of all majors at Northeastern University who are interested in structural engineering. The group provides professional development, social, and educational events through weekly get togethers that can draw attendance from their MS and PhD student members. NGSEA is a local student chapter of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) and this year, for the second year in a row, SEI has selected NGSEA to receive the 2021 SEI Graduate Student Chapter of the Year Award. The 2020 and 2021 awards recognize the engagement of the group members and the leadership of Nicholas Briggs (current NGSEA president), Fangzheng Sun (current NGSEA Vice President), Andrew Summerfield (past NGSEA President), and Professor Mehrdad Sasani (NGSEA’s Student Organization Advisor). Specifically this award celebrates NGSEA’s commitment to structural engineering through their innovation and creativity in providing unique events that engage members and promote the structural engineering profession.  

Congratulations, NGSEA! 

Throughout the pandemic, NGSEA has actively fostered interaction among structural engineering students in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering through hosting recreational events, coffee hour sessions, and research presentations by the graduate students and invited speakers from within and outside NU. NGSEA encourages its members to frequently participate in these activities, provide feedback to student speakers and use the meetings as a platform to share and discuss important department-wide and university-wide announcements and notifications. These events helped student engagement during this remote research and study period. Simultaneously, NGSEA endeavors to deliver its members  first-hand information about diverse future career opportunities in the industry and academia by inviting structural engineering alumni and faculty members to speak and answer questions regarding their career paths. These series of actions have been a great boost for current students to plan for their future careers. Moreover, NGSEA pursues a diverse academic experience for its members by seeking research presentations from speakers with background beyond structural engineering, such as environmental engineering and data science.