Missouri S&T holds a wide variety of STEM-related summer camps that bring in students from around the nation, and even all around the world.

In July, a group of four high school students from Saudi Arabia had a difficult journey getting to the Missouri S&T campus to attend the Exploring Materials in Your World Camp. While they were forced to miss most of the actual camp, S&T employees with the Kummer Center for STEM Education ensured the international students still had a fun and educational time while at Missouri S&T.

During this time, flights had been delayed due to the Crowdstrike outage that affected thousands of Microsoft computers. The cybersecurity company experienced a massive issue due to a faulty update for its security software, causing national widespread instability, leading to blue “screen-of-death” errors on thousands of Windows systems. This caused many flights to be delayed for hours or days.

Students Hammad Aldossary, Tahani Ahmed, Hadwa Alruhaili and Abdulzaziz Alharbi were stuck in Minneapolis for two days due to their flight delay. While they did enjoy some of the scenery in Minneapolis, they were excited to finally get to Missouri S&T, but they ran into another issue.

“We left Minneapolis trying to come to St. Louis, but we had to go to Chicago first because of another layover,” says Aldossary. “We got stuck in Chicago from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. until Valenda Curtis and Waleed Addas drove from Rolla to Chicago.”

Curtis is a program project specialist for the the Kummer Center for STEM Education and Addas is a sophomore in aerospace engineering and a summer camp counselor.

“It’s always a pleasure to have students discovering our campus and seeing the passion in their eyes,” Addas says. “For this group, coming all the way from Saudi Arabia to engage in our summer camps is particularly special. Spending a week at S&T is a fantastic opportunity that everyone should take advantage of.”

On the trip from Chicago to Rolla, they also made a stop in St. Louis since the students’ luggage had been lost. Thanks to Curtis and Addas, the group was able to get their belongings and finally visit Missouri S&T on Wednesday, July 24, one day before their camp ended.

Even though the group missed most of their scheduled camp activities, Curtis and Addas made sure the students had a fun and informative time at Missouri S&T. They attended a lecture, made friends with other campers, joined in on other summer camp activities, took a tour of the campus and still enjoyed STEM-related fun.

“We got to do experiments with some of the professors here,” Aldossary says. “It was very enjoyable. We got to meet people from other camps, talk about their experience at S&T and talk about our journey to S&T.”

Tahani Ahmed said she was grateful to Missouri S&T for helping her group get to campus with their quick thinking and sacrificing their time to travel.

“Thanks to their intervention and support, they were able to quickly book us hotels but also help us feel like we were not suffering, but rather enjoy our trip to actually get here,” she says. “Even though we missed most of the camp, I’m really grateful that they were able to move things around and provide facilities and activities within a short period of time.”

Ahmed said visiting professors and joining other summer camps helped them discover the type of STEM studies offered at Missouri S&T, as well as understanding the tight-knit community on campus.

“It’s like a beautiful family,” Ahmed said. “Everyone is really close to each other. I’ve already been able to make so many connections here.”

The students were also able to meet the university’s chancellor, Dr. Mo Dehghani, while on campus. He talked with the students about S&T’s engineering courses and unique student projects and experiments.

“I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of diversity in courses here compared to other places,” Ahmed says. “I was just looking through a booklet earlier about different projects Missouri S&T is doing, and I found a scuba robot study that was going on. I have never seen something like that. I am both a scuba diver and I also have done some work in robotics, but I’ve never thought of putting the two together until I saw the picture.”

For Aldossary, seeing the option for various student design teams is what excited him most.

“I’ve been part of formula design teams for three years,” he says. “When we went past the Formula SAE car during our tour, I took pictures of it. That type of learning environment is the environment I want.”

Ahmed said before their visit to S&T, they had only known the university by its name. Now, she would recommend the university to others.

“Now after I’ve had this amazing chance to come and visit all the facilities and to meet the professors here, and even work with them in their labs, I can confidently say that it’s become a university that I would recommend to people,” Ahmed says. “Even if I had already enrolled somewhere else, I would have considered coming here.”