Alpha Gamma Rho - Penn State University

4 TAU TIMES I am a junior from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In February, I attended the Top Leaders Institute in Philadelphia where I got to meet many of the northeast chapters at AGR. It was a great experience and networking event. My goal for this semester and over the summer is to continue to work with National and our alumni board to determine how to navigate our suspension. Next semester, I want to finish our educational program through Plaid, work with Educational Leadership Consultant Ben Willoughby, Omicron '15 for recruitment as well as the receivership team, and end my term as VNR planning by rewriting the terms of our suspension. I hope to be confident that Gamma Chapter will continue to be successful after my graduation in May 2025. VNR Planning Joshua Peters '22 (Γ1932) Navigating Our Suspension O ne of the classes I took this semester for my minor was called Leading Virtual International Engineering Teams. In this class, a group of eight of us worked concurrently with a group of students from Belgium Campus iTversity in South Africa on an autonomous hydroponics system. Though only a prototype, the system supports the growth of Swiss chard plants and is autonomously monitored via a variety of sensors controlled by a microcontroller, which can then return commands to automatically adjust things like nutrient concentration or water temperature. Over spring break, I was given the incredible opportunity to travel to South Africa with my classmates to work on the project further as well as bring it to Bela Bela Primary School in the Limpopo Province to present the project to the grade seven students. The overarching goal of the project was to provide an educational tool for these students—one that teaches them the importance of healthy, clean eating and ways that it can be made accessible in areas where conventional farming might be difficult. It was also to get these students excited about the pursuit of STEM fields. The vast majority of the students come from backgrounds of extreme economic instability; showing them how exciting STEM fields can be and all the different applications they can have will hopefully inspire them to work toward an education that can get them and their families out of extreme poverty and to a life with less struggle and uncertainty. Armend Berisha '23 (Γ1947) Works on and Presents Engineering Project in South Africa Providing an Educational Tool Armend Berisha '23 (Γ1947) and his classmates with the students of Bela Bela Primary School in South Africa. William H. Yerkes III '49 (Γ592) April 2024 C. D. Lechner '50 (Γ606) April 14, 2023 Merril Brofee '63 (Γ843) February 8, 2023 John Yocum '64 (Γ865) December 2023 Robert J. Lindquist '69 (Γ952) September 6, 2023 Philip Frieling '71 (Γ998) March 15, 2023 Chapter Eternal 4 TAU TIMES

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