• Getting my "Club Coach" certification from the Canadian Freestyle Association. I coached entry-level (Jumps and Bumps) freestyle this season, and it was probably the most fun I've had as a ski coach so far!
• Deciding what to do with my life (i.e. applying to jobs and grad school, interviews, rejecting offers, etc.)
• Being EngSci Club Chair (leading the Graditude Campaign, organizing Iron Ring, running a ski trip, etc.)
• Receiving awards (Cressy Student Leadership Award, Spirit of EngSci Award)
• Designing an airport.
• Designing a highway bridge.
• Designing Finite Element Analysis Software and modelling the Skydome.
• Writing a public policy paper on the Ethanol Fuel in the United States.

My point is... I've been pretty busy, and that's why I've been absent for a while. Look for some future posts related to my recent experiences, future plans, and other random tidbits that will appear once in awhile when I am so inspired!

Related posts:

1. Raphael Sammut is running for EngSci Club Chair! If you haven't heard already, I'm running for EngSci Club...
2. Thanks! Thanks to everyone who voted for the EngSci Club Elections!...

Here are two short films that I've acted in, and are both about engineering. So if you like the Big Bang Theory, you'll love these films about life in Canada's most challenging undergraduate engineering program.

No related posts.

Congratulations as well to Megan Lund, the new Vice-Chair, Henry Shi, the new Finance Director, Thariq Shihipar, the new Communications Director, and Peter Badea, the new Athletics Director.

You can look forward to an incredible and exciting year ahead with your new Exec Team!

Related posts:

1. Raphael Sammut is running for EngSci Club Chair! If you haven't heard already, I'm running for EngSci Club...

View my Facebook group, comment on this post (ask me questions), and vote in the EngSci Club Elections this Friday in the Common Room (if you're on PEY, you can vote by e-mail).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's what I've done:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• EngSci Class Rep (twice)
• Former Director of Communications for the EngSci Club
• UTEK/OEC/CEC Champion for Engineering Communications
• EngSci Leadership Working Group
• Head F!rosh Leader and F!rosh Week Chair for Leadership Development
• Faculty Representative for the National Engineering Summit
• TA for Praxis I & II

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's what I bring to the table:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Strong relationships with key university administrators, professors and option chairs from the Division of EngSci as well as the Faculty of Engineering.
• Loads of experience running and planning club events
• Excellent leadership and communication skills
• Enthusiasm, Creativity, and Spirit!
• Fresh Ideas (see below)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's what I will do for the EngSci Club next year:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Set Office Hours for Exec Members to be available in the Club Office
• New Events to enhance the student experience for EngScis
• Scheduling to ensure the Pop Machine is always full
• Better collaboration with EngSci Student Groups including NScientia, the Leadership Working Group, and NSight
• Creating new opportunities for student input and involvement on club decisions

IN SHORT: A more active, more fun, and more accessible EngSci Club!

Here are my posters, which have already been posted in the EngSci student space:

No related posts.

Professor Bentz with Drew and I.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to work with a prominent Civil Engineering professor at the University of Toronto. Professor Evan C. Bentz specializes in structural engineering, and his work focuses on developing software to aid in the analysis and simulation of structures. Professor Bentz has an incredible personality, great sense of humour, and can talk about almost anything to almost anyone for as long as he is able to talk and someone is able to listen. Some of the most interesting and random conversations of my entire life were had last summer in Professor Bentz’s office. This was my first research position, and I really lucked out because I got to work with some incredible people, and ended up doing something I found enjoyable.

My main projects this summer were centred around making Professor Bentz’s software run more efficiently and accurately. The software suite includes Membrane-2000 and Response-2000 for modelling walls, beams, and columns, and Augustus for assembling elements into a structure and running tests on them.

One particular project involved writing a Visual Basic script to accept data from a large spreadsheet database of experimental test results for beams and convert individual tests into a series of input files that could be read by the software. This allowed for an automated way of verifying the simulation test results with real data. Once completed, the macro generated all necessary files in under a minute for over 2000 entries, whereas it probably would have taken a year to do them all by hand.

My next project  was meant to push Augustus to its limits by designing and testing a model of a 20-storey apartment building in the Greater Toronto Area that Professor Bentz had previously done some analysis for. After three weeks of interpreting design drawings, mapping out the geometry of the structure, and defining all the structural elements, I excitedly pushed the button to run the tests and the software crashed. While it was disappointing not to get any results, it ended up leading to my most interesting and challenging project.

The core issue, or so we believe, with the Augustus software not being able to run the tests on the building was that the data that the software reads in is not stored efficiently. The software performs its analysis using the “Stiffness Method”, which is an easy way for a computer to calculate displacements on large structures. Every node, or point of interest, in the structure is represented by a number stored in a matrix. The matrix contains all the information about how each node has displaced as the tests run.

This issue lead to the development of a Genetic Algorithm (based on this blog post) to try and optimize the matrix before any calculations were run. After banging my head on a desk for about a week, things started to click, and the development began to progress fairly rapidly. By the end of the third week working on the project, we started getting some positive results that the Genetic Algorithm we implemented performed better than more traditional methods, but took significantly longer to execute (especially for matrices greater than 100x100 in size).

After spending a week on optimizing the algorithms used thanks to MATLAB’s handy profiler, the operation time was cut down significantly and our program could compute matrices up to 500x500 in size within a minute, even on a slow (1.86 GHz) processor.

The Genetic Algorithm project was the focus of a presentation I made at the Undergraduate Engineering Research Day at U of T, mainly since the use of genetic algorithms was such a novel and interesting approach to solving the matrix bandwidth reduction problem. The presentation, which was developed from 10pm – 3am the night before (since we only got results the same day) went very well and I was awarded the prize of a top presenter.

Overall my research experience was fun, challenging, and a great way to spend my summer. While I was paid roughly the same as when I was the Site Director for an entire YMCA camp, I had far less responsibility, got to work with some brilliant and dynamic people, and enjoyed the great flexibility in working hours that the academia world offers. My research team had very little supervision, and the vast majority of our work was all self-driven. The best part of the position was that I was constantly challenged. Whenever I began feeling comfortable and in control of a project, I was thrown something else that seemed impossible in the beginning, but was always successfully accomplished in the end. Furthermore, this project will serve as an excellent lead-in to my PEY work term in Spain with CYPE Ingenieros, and has opened the doors to future thesis work when I return to Canada in 2010 to finish my degree.

Related posts:

1. Preparing for a Professional Experience Year… in Spain! It was two summers ago when visiting my family in...

Raphael in the Sicilian countryside.

It was two summers ago when visiting my family in Europe that I first got the travel bug. At the time, I had just finished my first year of Engineering Science and dreamed of working in Europe for a summer. The prospect of learning a new language, being immersed in another culture, and having the freedom to travel to many fascinating places has always excited me.

When it came time to decide if I was going to do a Professional Experience Year (PEY) term in third year, I came to the conclusion that I would either find a rewarding international experience to pursue or continue on to fourth year and complete my degree. As a student of the Infrastructure Engineering program, there were great opportunities to work in different countries and I applied to jobs in the both the United States and Europe.

Last December, I was hired to complete a 12-month work term in Alicante, Spain starting in September 2009. I'll be working with a local Spanish engineering firm called CYPE Ingenieros, S.A.. My main focus will be on the expansion of a CAD software that can automatically verify if the designs for a structure meet the building code in the country where it will be constructed. I'll be succeeding another Engineering Science Infrastructure student, Geoff Frost (0T9+PEY), who has worked at CYPE since September 2008. While I can't share my PEY experiences yet, you can follow me on my journey by visiting my blog at http://raphsammut.ca/.

Raphael receiving his first place prize at the Canadian Engineering Competitions in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

In addition to finding work abroad, I was able to fulfill my appetite for travelling during the school year as well. This past winter, I competed in the University of Toronto Engineering Kompetitions (UTEK) and won first place in the Engineering Communication division for my presentation on emerging applications of RFID technology. This led me to compete in the Ontario Engineering Competitions (OEC) in Guelph where I won second place and qualified for the national level of competitions. At the Canadian Engineering Competitions (CEC), held in Fredericton, New Brunswick, I built upon all the feedback received from the earlier competitions and won first place along with a sponsorship to attend the first National Engineering Summit in Montreal held last May.

Currently, I am working with Professor Evan Bentz as a summer research student. My main projects have been related to the development of Augustus, a software suite that acts as a post-processor for the Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis of structural elements. Augustus has recently been expanded to allow easy modelling and simulation of entire structures.

No related posts.