Yesterday, the founder of Youth Fusion – Gabriel Bran Lopez – joined Vigilant employees over lunch. He brought along a robot for a lunchtime demo to motivate Vigilant employees about the upcoming 2012 FIRST Robotics challenge and the regional in Montreal.
Students from a high school in the greater Montreal area built the robot with the guidance of a Youth Fusion mentor from ETS University in Montreal. The idea was to get employees excited about the event Vigilant Futures is sponsoring in a few ways; first as an event co-sponsor along with other Montreal-based companies, and second through sponsoring the robot-build at Lasalle Community Comprehensive High School.
Vigilant Futures made the burden and worry of paying for university a little easier today with $3, 000 in scholarships for graduate students at the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS). The scholarship is open to engineering students doing their Master’s degree in Electricity, Telecommunications, Information Technology and Software.
ÉTS is part of the Université du Québec network and specializes in teaching and research in applied engineering and technology transfer. Just walk into their main building in their downtown campus and you’ll be greeted by solar powered vehicles, lightweight submarines and lots of other very interesting feats of engineering their students have, over the years, entered (and won) in international engineering competitions.
The school caters to students with CEGEP diplomas (better known as junior college outside Quebec) who were perhaps disinterested by the prospect of attending university but throughout their junior college career decided otherwise. These students often face loads of prerequisite classes their CEGEP diplomas didn’t provide for entry into university. That’s where ÉTS comes in and continues the ‘hands on’ tradition these students are used to and mix it with the right number of theory classes too.
Giving everyone an opportunity to learn is precisely why Vigilant was more than happy to partner with ÉTS and offer their students the extra incentive to keep at their studies.
