04/30/2016
Summary of 2014 - 2016
After 2 years of being president for the Rowan ACM Student Chapter, I am pleased to introduce Nick Weintraut as the new President of Rowan ACM with Paul Turner as Vice President. I will say that it has been a long 2 years with amazing progress that I couldn't imagine any other organization being capable of doing.
When I started as President in Fall of 2014, we only had 5 members, all of whom were from the execute board. Our e-mail roster was limited to maybe 10 people at most and we had no budget to start with. Safe to say, it was a rough start. I remember it becoming even odder with another organization with the same agenda as us emerging due to our previous inactivity. On top of this, I remember receiving one of the most unusual e-mails from a classmate wanting to work with ACM. Putting that aside, that e-mail allowed me to meet Albert Rynkiewicz (Al Bee) who was probably one of the nicest people I've ever met and became part of our e-board for 2014-2015.
In this same year, I also had the chance to meet with Nick Dondiego, who asked us to start the Rowan Animation Team within ACM, which would later become the Rowan Animation Game Development Team (RAGDT) and became highly successful with him at the helm. On top of this, I would consider Nick a good friend. With this format of committees started from RAGDT, we knew how to grab more people and by the end of the year we had a roster of over 120 people with more than 20 members coming per a meeting. We also had several projects being developed, such as an animation and game within RAGDT as well as another new committee used for web developement (Web Dev) that aided in revamping our website each year. Along with these committees, we also had many stars among our members that worked more than the rest, such as Nick Weintraut, Paul Turner, Richard Cerone, and Jatin Bhakta who would later form our executive board for 2015-2016.
With a new budget, new members, and a new look, we were able to take on the 2015-2016 year for what I could say was the most successful year in our organization's history. Starting from the first meeting we had more than 80 people show up! Along with this, our roster changed, increasing from 100 people to over 300! That first meeting was outstanding with so many laughs of joy and people interested in different aspects of Computer Science, giving me more than I could ever ask for. As the year progressed it only improved with the creating of the Rowan Android Development team (RAD) lead by Jonathan Saunders with Tyler Carberry as the learning chair, as well as the Rowan Artificial Intelligence Development team (RAID) lead by Nick LaPosta with Chris Heisler as the learning chair. From these 2 teams, as well as the expansion of Web Dev and RAGDT, our organization continued to grow. Later on, we would have Shaan Menon as treasurer who would do an outstanding job in Web Development with Richard Cerone and Chris Pryer.
Along with all these new committees doing several different projects, we also had many moments of volunteering in different event, such as the FIRST LEGO Robot League, the Rowan University Programming Contest, as well as working with the Glassboro Library on Code & Cookies, an event used to teach kids programming and comptuer science which we hope to do more in the future as an ACM event. On top of this, we worked with Rowan IEEE on ProfHacks, Rowan University's first hackathon, which was not only incredibly successful thanks to Nick Felker and Christopher Frederickson, but also will hopefully continue for the years to come.
It is now the end of Spring 2016, and I can only see a prospering future for not only the organization, but also for the CS department, for Rowan University, and most importantly, for the many members who worked not just Fridays, but several times during each week to work on a project on their own.
Thank you for letting me lead in this awesome experience,
John Bucknam
President of Rowan ACM (Fall 2014 - Spring 2016)
