 My name is Pooja Shah. I'm a graduate teaching assistant for EPICS. Before this, I was a student for three semesters in the Aero Aster Engineering Education team, two semesters of which I was a project manager and my first semester as a design lead. I decided to join the Aero Aster Engineering Education team because as a child, I got to go to NASA Space Camp and that really influenced my decision to be an engineer. And I feel like outreach programs like that really help to inspire the next generation of boiler makers. What we aim to do in that team is to design activities for students targeted in seventh to eighth grade. We design different activities to teach them about collaborating on teams, STEM principles, how to work on an open-ended problem because engineers, that's something that we don't realize when we go into the workforce because we're so used to having a set answer for every question. EPICS really teaches you that that's not how it is in real life. There's multiple answers to all these problems that we have out there. It takes a lot of creativity and critical thinking to be able to solve those problems in a team of people with different backgrounds and different experiences. As freshmen and sophomores, you haven't gotten into your super technical courses yet. EPICS is a really good way to introduce you to a lot of new skills. We have things called professional development hours where if you're unfamiliar with something like electrical circuits or solid works models, there's professional development hours where a TA who is an expert in all of these things can teach you about those different skill sets and not necessarily engineering skills but leadership skills, educational skills. We have a lot of professionals from industry come and speak to us and those all count towards your professional development hours which basically help you grow as an individual and will put you ahead of your peers in the same year as you. Now as sophomores and juniors, we really recommend students joining the team because they provide that extra push to the team because they already have that experience and when you're working with freshmen and sophomore, they have those role models to work off of. So it really uses our expertise out of the courses that they've already taken and helped the freshmen who may not have gotten into something as heavy or technical so far. EPICS really helped me kind of complete the circle in terms of giving back to the community and what I got out of outreach experiences like being at NASA Space Camp, I hope that through my contribution in EPICS as a project manager and incorporating those activities we designed into Space Day, that it helped other children be just as inspired and piqued their interest in STEM principles or being an engineer or anything science related. EPICS is a great way for you, engineering or non-engineering majors to be able to give back to the community and to kind of complete that circle in terms of community service but also building your skills at the same time. So I would really recommend that to students because it's such a well-rounded experience that you can not only learn something but also give back to the community at the same time.