About

What is Spheres

One of the suggested names for Spheres sums its purpose up nicely: "When google fails."

The purpose of Spheres is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge that would be helpful to current and future grad students in Mechanical Engineering at BYU. Spheres is both a repository and a chatroom: it's a place to store formally organized information, like wikipages, and informally organized info, like helpful conversations.

Let’s face it, we spend a lot of time learning tiny lessons that someone, somewhere already knows and learned for themselves. Sure, some lessons have to be learned slowly in order to stick. Others, though, can and should be overcome more quickly. Like that annoying bug in latex. You gain nothing by suffering through forums for hours before finding the info you need.

Or, like the lesson you learn from conversations about how to best study for the "qualls"(Qualifying exams for Phd students). Every semester the conversation happens again as a recital of what was taught to the teacher a semester prior when he/she took the exams. Or the conversation about how to negotiate pay when in the process of securing a full time job. Or how to use Adobe Illustrator to make simple graphics.

Then there are the conversations that don't happen as often, but are sometimes even more valuable: How to be an effective Grad student.

Things function nicely enough while you have someone to teach you these lessons as your next-door-cubicle-neighbor. The tragedy is when the expert graduates, leaving students to relearn the hard way: with google as their mentor.

Don't leave your fellow students with google as their mentor. We all know how often our beloved google fails. Contribute some of your hard earned knowledge to the spheres repository.

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”

Winston Churchill

What led to its creation?

The idea for creating Spheres was inspired by the construction of the new engineering building.

The new Engineering Building was designed with student collaboration in mind. The building features two “Collaborative Classrooms”, 12 team rooms, and community lab spaces meant to “encourage related research groups to collaborate more and interact”. An entire floor was devoted to the Student Innovation Center- “a collaborative prototyping area surrounded by individual project bays.”

As an additional testament to the power of collaboration, the fundraising itself was a team effort. The $85 million required to build the EB was raised by a group of individuals and organizations from various backgrounds united under the same cause. Not only were Ira A. Fulton, Jack Wheatley, and the Sorenson Legacy Foundation contributors, but also The College of Life Sciences, the Division of Continuing Education at BYU, and even Print and Mail Services.

With all the emphasis on collaboration, you might wonder, like we did: How often do I collaborate? What will a new building really do to help me collaborate more?

As President Worthen said during the groundbreaking ceremony, “As wonderful as the fundraising stories are...it's really [about] what’s going to happen in this building and what's going to happen in the lives of the students who are here.”

Spheres exists because we believe the cause of collaboration is a good one, and we want to actively and consciously pursue it.

By collaborating a little more today than we did yesterday, we will learn more things, learn them faster, solve harder problems and produce better overall solutions. As a plus, we'll have more fun doing it.