Fundraising letters mailed to 59 area busineses

December 18, 2006

Fundraising Letters

Today we have mailed fundraising letters to 59 area businesses to ask for their financial support. Many thanks to club members Wayne, Theron, Berlyn, and John for composing the fundraising letter and addressing the envelopes.

Our Mission

An important part of America's strength lies in the creativity and talent of its engineers and scientists. According to the National Institute of Sciences, in 2004 more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China. In India, the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.

We believe that public schools need to do more to expose students to engineering and engineering-related activities. Our club exists to help engineering- and science-oriented students to bridge the gap between high school and their careers.

Our Needs

We are very fortunate this year to have received over $1000 in funding from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in support of our Electronic Stethoscopes project. But these funds can only be used for the stethoscope project, and cannot be used for capital expenses such as electronics test equipment.

We are a new club, started in 2005, and we do not yet have some of the basic equipment that would allow us to do many of the things that real engineers do. For our electronic stethoscope project, we are currently using a borrowed oscilloscope, and we do not have basic test equipment such as a bench power supply or a frequency generator.

In order to prepare for the Fire-Fighting Robot contest to be held at the Penn State Abington campus on March 31, 2007, we will need to purchase lumber and fasteners, additional motors and sensors for our LEGO MindStorms robotics systems, and software programming textbooks.

Our fundraising goal of $1,750 would allow us to meet all of these needs.

Long-Term Benefits

Most of the items we would like to purchase are equipment items that would be used every year by many students. These items would make it possible for us to tackle more sophisticated projects in the future while also making our projects more interesting and enjoyable to the students.