I gave a tour of Discovery Park today unlike any tour I’ve given before. A prospective transfer student and his father came in to take a look at the College of Engineering. They were two of the most enthusiastic people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They wanted to know every function, every purpose, and every spec of every machine in the building. And you know what?! I don’t blame them. There are some pretty awesome pieces of equipment at Discovery Park that many students aren’t aware of.
We asked people in different departments to explain to us what the various machines did. Materials Science and Engineering is easily one of the most incredible departments. They have an electron microscope worth over a million dollars! And this microscope is powerful—we’re talking 100,000 X magnification. To put it simply, that microscope is so powerful that you can actually see atoms of various materials! In the room next to the electron microscope they’ve got this machine that can engrave UNT’s logo at 10 microns—that’s about 1/8 the width of a strand of hair. It’s just amazing.
In Electrical Engineering we’ve got some robots being programmed to be Mars Rovers, which is equally as impressive. The department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering has an undergrad research group studying the possibility of a liquid nitrogen powered car. The Engineering Technology department even has their own wind tunnel!
Seeing people get so excited about the things we do at Discovery Park really makes me proud to be a student here. It would be really neat if we could set up a tour for current students so they, too, can see all of the remarkable things going on in each department.
Random Fact: One of the most popular forms of Halloween fortune-telling involved using a mirror to discover the identity of one's future husband. Although it had many variations, a typical method involved sitting before a mirror at midnight on Halloween, eating an apple and brushing one's hair; supposedly an image of your loved one would appear in the glass
We asked people in different departments to explain to us what the various machines did. Materials Science and Engineering is easily one of the most incredible departments. They have an electron microscope worth over a million dollars! And this microscope is powerful—we’re talking 100,000 X magnification. To put it simply, that microscope is so powerful that you can actually see atoms of various materials! In the room next to the electron microscope they’ve got this machine that can engrave UNT’s logo at 10 microns—that’s about 1/8 the width of a strand of hair. It’s just amazing.
In Electrical Engineering we’ve got some robots being programmed to be Mars Rovers, which is equally as impressive. The department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering has an undergrad research group studying the possibility of a liquid nitrogen powered car. The Engineering Technology department even has their own wind tunnel!
Seeing people get so excited about the things we do at Discovery Park really makes me proud to be a student here. It would be really neat if we could set up a tour for current students so they, too, can see all of the remarkable things going on in each department.
Random Fact: One of the most popular forms of Halloween fortune-telling involved using a mirror to discover the identity of one's future husband. Although it had many variations, a typical method involved sitting before a mirror at midnight on Halloween, eating an apple and brushing one's hair; supposedly an image of your loved one would appear in the glass
